Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture 9780822382225

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Present Tense

PRESENT

TENSE

Rock & Roll and Culture Edited by Anthony DeCurtis Duke University Press Durham and London 1992

© 1992 Duke University Press Third printing, 1997 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 00 The text of this book was originally published without index or the present preface as volume 90, number 4 of the South Atlantic Quarterly. "The Eighties," by Anthony DeCurtis, originally appeared as "The 80'S" in Rolling Stone #591. By Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. © 1990. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. "A Corpse in Your Mouth: Adventures of a Metaphor, or, Modern Cannibalism," by Greil Marcus, is an excerpt from his book Dead Elvis: A Chronicle ofa Cultural Obsession, © 1991 Greil Marcus. It is reprinted here by permission of the author. "Signposts on the Road to Nowhere: Laurie Anderson's Crisis of Meaning," by Mark Dery, © 1989 Mark Dery. It is reprinted here by permission of the author. Portions of the interview originally appeared in a November 1989 cover story published in Keyboard magazine. By Mark Dery, © 1989 Miller Freeman Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Keyboard magazine. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication I)ata appear on the last printed page of this book.

This is for you, Frank.

Contents

Preface

ix

The Eighties ANTHONY DECURTIS

The Church of the Sonic Guitar

13

ROBERT PALMER

The Enemy Within: Censorship in Rock Music in the 1950S

39

TRENT HILL

A Corpse in Your Mouth: Adventures of a Metaphor, or Modern Cannibalism

73

GRElL MARCUS

Why Don't We Do It in the Classroom? GLENN GASS

Playing for England

101

PAUL SMITH

Rock & Roll as a Cultural Practice DAVID R. SHUMWAY

117

93

viii

Contents

Tracking

135

ROBERTB. RAY

Signposts on the Road to Nowhere: Laurie Anderson's Crisis of Meaning

149

MARK DERY

Concerning the Progress of Rock & Roll

167

MICHAEL JARRETT

Los Angeles, 1999

183

PAUL EVANS

Sexual Mobilities in Bruce Springsteen: Performance as Commentary

197

MARTHA NELL SMITH

About a Salary or Reality?-Rap's Recurrent Conflict

219

ALAN LIGHT

Voguing at the Carnival: Desire and Pleasure on MTV

235

DAN RUBEY

Living by Night in the Land of Opportunity: Observations on Life in a Rock & Roll Band 27 1 JEFF CALDER

Index

303

Notes on Contributors

315

Preface

In 1990 a younger colleague asked me what I perceived to be the biggest changes that had taken place in American culture since I was in college. I entered college in 1969-need more be said? Still, I'd long since gotten over any Sixties nostalgia I may ever have felt, and, fifteen years younger than me, he'd grown up he~r to the full range of sophisticated critiques of Sixties-style leftism that had gained currency over the past two decades-the absence of any meaningful class analysis by the New Left easily being the most obvious and important. After agreeing on the most pervasive change that had taken place-that what was considered the political right in the late Sixties and early Seventies had become the center-we began to talk about the Sixties as a kind of symbolic era, less important for the successes or mistakes of the movements of the time than for the belief instilled in many young people that all social structures were malleable and could be transformed for the better. How many people, young or old,

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believe anything like that now? To what degree should they believe it, and was it true even then? Because both my colleague and I spend a good deal of our time writing and thinking about popular music, the talk then turned to how the meaning of rock & roll has shifted. It was hard to convey to someone who had grown up in the late Seventies and Eighties how much rock & roll mattered in the period between, say, 1964 and 1972. Every album by Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones during that time seemed infused with messages about how to live. Most of those records-with some notable exceptions-hold up quite well to this day, but they have taken on the sanctioned power of classics. From its earliest days, rock & roll has never been about sanctioned power. In the wake of the money culture that took shape in the Eighties, would it ever be possible for rock & roll to assume again a progressive role in American culture? By the time of our conversation, many observers had even begun to wonder if rock was dead. Is it? In a partial attempt to address those questions-and to answer my friend's original question-I accepted Frank Lentricchia's invitation to edit a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly on rock & roll. That issue, which came out in the fall of 1991 and which was titled "Rock & Roll and Culture," eventually became this book. The ironies, of course, were ruthlessly apparent from the start-and still are. After all, what could be more an expression of sanctioned power than an editor at an enormously successful mass circulation consumer magazine editing a book on a titillating subject and having it published by a prestigious scholarly press? But sanctioned power is power nonetheless and, like the subject it covers, rock criticism has often found ways to subvert the status quo, to avoid conforming to standards of acceptance that would dull its edge. Like much academic writing these days, rock criticism has routinely assumed that art is created in a social context; that hard distinctions between elite and popular art are ill-advised; that art created by minorities and working-class people is worthy of serious discussion; that writing criticism is itself a form of "creative writing"; and that critical writing can be a means of exploring broader questions about life in the culture at large. In fact, if the quality and variety of responses it generates is one important indicator of the ongoing vitality of an art form, rock & roll is very much alive.

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xi

In that regard, demonstrating the extraordinary range and quality of writing about rock & roll is one of the most significant purposes of this volume. As someone who enjoys doing both types of work, I have been saddened by the degree to which academic and journalistic writing have been forced apart since the late Seventies. That, it seems to me, was another subtle, but no less pernicious, effect of the money culture. If campuses were at the very heart of what was happening in America in the Sixties and early Seventies, that certainly was not the case during the Reagan years, when Wall Street was the center of the action. Pushed to the margins by the go-go economy of the Eighties, academics struck back by retreating into a cult of the obscure-and thereby accelerated their movement out of the mainstream. For their part, journalists allowed their writing to become increasingly ephemeral, a gloss on the glossy surface of the decade, just another twitch of the pulsating celebrity fanfest that popular culture became. I was determined to try to bridge that gap, if only by getting a group of academics and independent critics to mingle together between the covers of the same book. I wanted the book to be a combination of a smart scholarly enterprise and a special issue of Rollin8 Stone, a resource from which both specialists and intelligent general readers could draw sustenance. Consequently, Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture is the furthest thing possible from a manifesto, at least as far as I'm concerned: there's too much in it with which I disagree! I was more concerned with suggesting potential directions for thinking about popular music than enforcing any particular one. I was also determined to achieve a mix of theoretical, speculative, technical, and practical approaches to rock & roll. This extended to including a work of fiction-rock & roll as a purely imaginative experience. Additionally, a number of the contributors to Present Tense are active musicians, as well as being writers. This linking of ideas to action appealed to me-the ideas gain force through some semblance of realization in the world, the actions gain substance from being the subject of serious thought. Some of the pieces that follow are historical; some are experiential; some are wildly abstract-all are valid. This desire on my part to create a kind of intellectual utopia with a rock & roll soundtrack is challenged, of course, by the fact that many of the approaches taken in this book fully contradict each other.

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That's part of the tension the title is meant to suggest. Beyond that, at this point in its development, rock & roll stands in a tense relationship with its own mythology, its own musicological history, and with the broader culture in which music plays a part. It is both fully woven into the fabric of the American corporate structure and endlessly the subject of efforts to censor its rebellious, anarchic impulses. It is safe as milk and a clear and present danger. It is unlikely that anyone could come up with a definition of rock & roll that every contributor to Present Tense would endorse. That such a basic question, the very nature of our subject, is still up for grabs is part of what makes this music-and writing about it-exciting. Doing it first, defining it later is a true rock & roll gesture. Believing that the more deeds and the more definitions the better is another. Keep on rocking, make more meanings: Present Tense is dedicated to both those propositions. Anthony DeCurtis New York City

Present Tense

Anthony DeCurtis

The Eighties

I

n November of 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected to his first term as president of the United States. A little more than a month later, on 8 December, John Lennon was shot to death outside his apartment building in New York City. Each of those events had its own all-too-real causes and consequences. But each has also come to bear the weight of symbol; each is a lens through which the mood and the manners of the 1980s, the cultural climate of the decade that followed, may be read. Some say the 1960s died at Altamont; others say the 1960s died at Kent State. But whatever vestige of 1960s-style visionary thinking and progressive politics managed to survive the 1970s-when, after all, the Watergate revelations and Nixon's resignation at least partly vindicated 1960S radicalism and inspired a brief resurgence of idealism among the young-who can deny that the election of Ronald Reagan proved to be the fatal blow to the 1960S dream? Even the liberal values of the Great Society, which were little more

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than an extension of the civilizing efforts of FOR's New Deal, were anathema to Reagan-let alone the wild utopian urges that were meant to transport us to the Gates of Eden, or the road of counterculture excess that would lead us to the Palace of Wisdom. The generous collective impulses of the 1960s may ultimately have yielded to the Me Decade hedonism of the 1970S. But who knew that the next stop would be the pinched privatism, the smug selfishness, the glib pragmatism, the grim status consciousness, the greed masking as taste, the brutal superficiality of the 1980s? Who knew that the hung over sybarites of the Me Decade would transform, as if in the course of a nationwide Night of the Living Dead, into the desperately sober workaholics of the Gimme Decade? Could there possibly have been a place for the likes of John Lennon in such a world? The point is not that Lennon was a saint, too good to live among the gleefully solvent sinners of the 1980s. It's just that he was too ungovernable, too unlikely to play by the rules, too interested in the margins to succumb to the savage mainstreaming of the last decade. The willful experimentalism, loopy romanticism, and smiling politics that Lennon represented-this was a man, you will recall, who believed that bed-ins and planting acorns could bring about world peace-are not virtues that would have carried much weight in an era during which greed was the ultimate good. The characteristics that define the personality of Lennon's assassin, Mark David Chapman-an obsession with Lennon's media image to the point of obliterating the reality of Lennon the person, a worship of Lennon's power and celebrity so intense that it shaded into violence and hatred, a need to destroy the ideal he could not himself attain-are far more central to an understanding of the past decade. Like the killings at Kent State, Lennon's death struck at the very souls of a generation and made idealism seem senseless, even dangerous. The vacuum left in those dead souls was filled in the 1970S with a craving for pleasure that could be kindled in a moment and extinguished just as quickly, pleasure not as a means of self-discoverynot even to be enjoyed for its own delicious sake-but as a distraction from numbness, a way to feel something, however briefly. Money and possessions-things that could be counted, measured, and used and that, for those reasons, provided the illusion of certainty-filled the

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3

vacuum in the 1980S. That so many of the people who wept and lit candles to mourn john Lennon's death eventually fell into step with the unforgiving individualism of the Age of Reagan is only one of the innumerable contradictions of the decade.

Musically, the 1980S got off to an unsteady start indeed. The punk explosion of the late 1970S had succeeded in stalling the alienating superstar juggernaut that had defined the earlier years of that decade, but punk itself became too self-infatuated and failed to gain much of a popular audience. Progressive artists like Talking Heads and Elvis Costello found a niche, but many of their contemporaries had either burned out or simply fallen by the wayside. In the early years of the decade, the economy was poor, video games-a technological harbinger of the very real war games to come-had seized the imagination of the young, and record sales were down significantly. It hardly seemed as if music mattered at all. Then an event occurred that would energize the music scene once again and set in motion all the forces that would go on to shape the popular culture of the 1980s. On 16 May 1983, before a viewership of nearly fifty million people, Michael Jackson performed his Number 1 single "Billie jean" on Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, and Forever, the television special that commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of Motown Records. After that, for better or worse, nothing was the same. To that point, Michael jackson's Thriller, which had been released on 1 December 1982 and had hit Number 1 during Christmas week, seemed as if it were going to be a successful record in the manner of Off the Wall, jackson's fine previous solo album, which was released in 1979 and had sold more than six million copies. But jackson's electrifying performance of "Billie jean" sent fans streaming into record stores, where they often purchased another album or two before leaving, giving the music business a much-needed economic shot in the arm. Thriller would go on to sell some forty million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling album in history, but its significance is far greater than even this astonishing number would indicate. It must be remembered that jackson's appearance on the Motown

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special was not exclusively, or even primarily, a musical performance. jackson lip-synced to a recorded track-the better to execute his breathtaking dance steps, including the mind-boggling Moonwalkand there were no musicians onstage even to create the illusion that a band was playing. For imagery, atmosphere, costuming, and choreography, jackson drew on the video he had made for "Billie jean"a prescient strategy that would go on to become conventional wisdom for artists like Madonna, Paula Abdul, jackson's sister janet, and a host of other acts in the coming years. In a decade in which visuals meant as much as music, and live performance aspired to mimicking the static perfection of videos, jackson's rendering of "Billie jean" on Motown 25 was a watershed. Just about a month or two before Motown 25 aired, MTV had broken its de facto boycott of videos by black performers and begun showing jackson's "Billie jean" and "Beat It" clips. In the "Beat It" video, jackson's audacious fusion of heavy metal-Eddie Van Halen played guitar on the track-and black street-gang imagery proved forward-looking, and jackson and MTV proved to be a peerless match. Founded in 1981, MTV had been flexing its muscles for a couple of years, finding a primarily youthful audience for a seemingly endless series of visually striking British bands of questionable talent like Duran Duran, Thompson Twins, and Men Without Hats and, to far more desirable effect, shaking up radio's monopoly on hit making. Still, MTV's standing was sufficiently precarious at the time that, rumor had it, CBS Records pressured the network into showing jackson's videos by threatening to pull the clips of all its other acts. By the end of the decade, MTV's preeminence was so thoroughly established that such a threat would have been tantamount to filing for bankruptcy. Quite apart from its considerable musical merits, Thriller defined both a strategy and a standard for success in the 1980S. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones had liberated recording artists from the tyranny of the hit single in the 1960s and had established the album as a means of making an 'artistic statement. That tyranny returned in spades in the 1980s. Artistic statements or not, albums were seen as little more than collections of singles in the wake of Thriller's

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5

seven Top 10 hits-and this was as true of Born in the U.S.A. and The Joshua Tree as of Like a Viryin, as true of Purple Rain as of Forever Your Girl. You might be a brilliant songwriter and a stunning musician, but after Thriller's ground-breaking videos and the apotheosis of MTV, you'd better be something of an actor, too-or at least a pretty face. And about those sales figures: a gold record-earned by sales of more than five hundred thousand records-might have impressed people in the 1960s and 1970S, but those days are long gone. After Thriller, platinum sales-earned by selling a million or more copieswere a prerequisite for stardom. Except for rare prestige acts-performers whose recognized status as important artists made them valuable to record companies despite their relatively low sales-the notion that you could have a productive career selling a few hundred thousand albums with each release was dead. To a greater degree than ever before, marketing-the creation and selling of an image-became an essential component of an artist's success. Videos, video compilations, long-form videos, corporate sponsorships, product endorsements, T-shirts, book deals, interviews, television appearances, movie tie-ins, songs for soundtracks-all that began to envelop what was once considered a rebel's world, the world you chose because you had no other choice or you hated the idea of working for the man, because you wanted independence and freedom and nothing less, because you wanted that greatest of all possible goods, that most sublime of all possible states: to be a rock & roll star. Being a rock & roll star became a job, and true to the 1980s ethic, you'd better be willing to put in the hours and produce-to smile and make nice with the powers that be-or you might as well go back to the bars.

By the mid- 1980s, rock & roll was well on its way to becoming terminally safe. Joining a rock band had become a career move like any other, about as rebellious as taking a business degree and, if you got lucky, more lucrative. Your accountant was likely to be as hip as your lead singer. And far from resisting the marketing demands made of them, artists seemed to be tripping over themselves in their eagerness

6 Anthony DeCurtis

to sellout, to lease their songs to sell products, to put their dreams in the service of commerce. Then, just as it seemed that rock & roll was incapable of offending anyone, Tipper Gore discovered the line about masturbation in "Darling Nikki," on Prince's Purple Rain album, and founded the Parents' Music Resource Center (PMRC). The drive to place warning stickers on albuID.s was underway. Due to the influential standing of Gore, who is married to Albert Gore, Jr., the Democratic senator from Tennessee, and her colleague Susan Baker, wife of Secretary of State James A. Baker III, Senate hearings were held in which members of Congress pondered the meaning of rock lyrics. Rock & roll was the first target in the war on the arts that would soon escalate. Eventually-and predictably-the controversy over lyric content and the effects of popular music on young people centered on the two musical forms that, despite their massive sales, still retained something of an outsider's edge: rap and heavy metal. Given how polarized our society became during the Reagan years, it is impossible not to see elements of racial and class prejudice in that development. While both genres have very much entered the mainstream, the core audience for rap is still black and the core audience for metal still consists largely of working-class whites. These constituencies are typically not given much credit for being able to tell the difference between the dramatic situation in a song and the realities of their own lives. For that matter, the performers who speak to those constituencies are not thought capable of that distinction, either. If Eric Claptonwho is white and, better yet, English-covers a Bob Marley song and sings about shooting the sheriff, it's understood that he's an "artist" and doesn't really mean it. He can enjoy a Top 10 hit unhindered by questions about his motives or the effect on his listeners of the song he is singing. If the members of N. W.A, who are black, rap about a violent confrontation with the police, as they did on their blistering 1988 album Straiaht Outta Compton, they are presumed to be too primitive to understand the distinction between words and actions, between life and art. Their reward is organized boycotts and FBI harassment. In the case of 2 Live Crew, the reward is arrest and potential imprisonment. In many ways, the response that those groups have ignitedalong with the legal difficulties endured by Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest in cases involving the effects of their songs on listeners-lends

The Einhties

7

validation to the provocative content of much rap and heavy metal. The closest parallel to this persecution is the Nixon administration's effort to deport John Lennon in the 1970S because of his activism and the political content of his music. But if rock & roll succumbed to the ethos of greed that characterized the Gimme Decade, and if it is still struggling to find the conviction to battle the incursions of bluenoses, it also helped restore a semblance of social consciousness to a period that, for the most part, borrowed its attitudes toward the less fortunate from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It took Bob Geldof, the charmingly brash leader of a failing Irish rock band, for example, to focus the attention of the entire world on the famine in Africa with Band Aid and Live Aid. In response to a statement Bob Dylan made from the stage during his performance at the Live Aid concert in Philadelphia, John Mellencamp, Willie Nelson, and Neil Young organized a series of concerts to assist the struggling farmers in America's heartland. U2 headlined a series of shows in 1986 that helped bring a little-known London-based human rights organization called Amnesty International to the forefront of political awareness in the United States. Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Peter Gabriel, and Tracy Chapman carried Amnesty's banner around the world-often to countries with frightening human rights records-two years later. Those high-profile actions were not universally celebrated, however. They occasionally drew criticism-some of it justified or at least understandable. The big show could be seen as a kind of quick fix, and the quick fix, preferably as executed by internationally known celebrities, was a very 1980s phenomenon-as was the sense of boredom and even resentment that just as quickly set in when the quick fix inevitably failed to work. Consequently, it was important that mammoth gestures on the order of Live Aid and the Amnesty tours were backed up by hundreds of artists like Jackson Browne, KRS-One, Living Colour, R.E.M., Simple Minds, and 10,000 Maniacs. These performers consistently played benefits and supported causes in quotidian ways that demonstrated that problems do not disappear because a bevy of superstars fill a stadium and move their fans to dial an 800 number. If rockers looked beyond the borders of their cities and countries

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and addressed the larger issues in the world around them, they also looked beyond their aesthetic borders for inspiration in their music. Talking Heads, led to African rhythms by their producer Brian Eno, stunned the music world in 1980 with the release of Remain in Light, an album whose relentless drive and thematic reach set the stage for similar experiments by other artists. Peter Gabriel's solo records and performing bands through the 1980s borrowed a host of sounds from musicians around the world. Gabriel returned the favor in 1989 by establishing his Realworld label, distributed by Virgin Records, to bring the sounds of what had become known as "world music" to the West. Certainly the most commercially successful-and controversialcross-cultural fusion was Paul Simon's Graceland. Released in 1986 in a charged political atmosphere, the album drew critical raves but also incited a firestorm of protest because Simon had visited South Africa to record the album, violating the cultural boycott declared by the United Nations and the African National Congress, the organization leading the struggle against apartheid. The debate that ensued was bitter and prolonged. The musical merits of the album often seemed beside the point as the discussion centered on the proper role of artists in the political battles of their time. Undoubtedly the experience was unpleasant for everyone involved, but it provided further evidence of popular music's vitality and its ability to comment on and even enter the essential struggles of the age. In addition to his political activism in support of Amnesty International and efforts to help preserve the rain forests, Sting broadened his musical palette in the 1980s, leaving behind the Police to work with jazz musicians like saxophonist Branford Marsalis and pianist Kenny Kirkland on two ground-breaking solo albums: The Dream of the Blue Turtles and ... Nothins Like the Sun. Onstage, Sting's bands played like bands-a virtual miracle in a decade in which improvisation, not to say playing instruments at all, was held to an absolute minimum so as to make sure musicians did not fall out of time with prerecorded accompaniment or computerized lighting cues. Bruce Springsteen, U2, and R.E.M. also played an essential role in preserving the human element in rock & roll at a time when technology threatened to overwhelm flesh and blood. Springsteen ran the

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gamut from the stark, acoustic balladry of Nebraska to the booming rock & roll of his massively popular breakthrough album, Born in the U.S.A., all the while keeping the lives of his characters in rich focus with all the skill of a masterful short-story writer. U2 came roaring out of Dublin in 1980 with a message of hope, faith, and passion that eventually reached an audience of millions with The Joshua Tree in 1987. The anemic British synth-pop that U2 blew off the international stage early in the decade with fervent albums like Boy and War is now, for the most part, a dim memory. Just as U2 put Dublin on the pop-music map, R.E.M. emerged from Athens, Georgia, in 1981 with the independently released single "Radio Free Europe"/"Sitting Still" and gradually built an audience through relentless touring and an inspiring refusal to compromise with the more absurd edicts of the music industry. To this day, R.E.M. stands as a model of how a young band can remain true to its own idiosyncratic vision and still reach large numbers of listeners. By the end of the 1980S, rap-which got its start in the mid-I970S in the South Bronx and took 'the country by storm in 1986 when RunO.M.C. (with the help of Aerosmith on the smash single "Walk This Way") and the Beastie Boys each racked up multi-platinum albumswas bearing much of the brunt of criticism for how soulless music had become. Indeed, rap's reliance on prerecorded rhythm tracks and sounds borrowed-some would say stolen-through sampling continues to make the genre all too vulnerable to such charges. But at a time when most pop songs featured lyrics that were hardly worth any attention at all, rap placed words and the human voice at the very center of its sound. All talk about the irresistibility of hiphop beats aside for the moment, what could possibly be more human than the insistent, demanding voices that came blasting out of tracks like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message," RunO.M.C.'s "King of Rock," or Public Enemy's "Bring the Noise"? Among its many other contributions to music in the 1980s, rap gave the big lie to the view-so common among rockers and some tediously hip rock critics-that lyrics don't matter. A black rocker in the tradition of Jimi Hendrix, Prince was perhaps the artist who moved most gracefully amid even the most dangerous currents of the 1980s. Before it became fashionable-or even fashion-

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ably controversial-Prince shattered sexual stereotypes in 1980 with Dirty Mind, a bold rock-funk fusion that boasted songs about incest, oral sex, and troilism, and a cover that featured Prince himself in black bikini underpants, all without seeming the slightest bit sensational. The urgent staccato riff that drove that album's title trackthe essence of Minneapolis funk-would prove to be one of the most influential sounds of the decade. His work was a major target of the censorship brigade, but Prince never condescended to enter the fray, even mustering, presumably on the basis of his spiritual beliefs, some sympathy for his tormentors. Prince also managed the visual demands of the decade with flair, offering up both a terrific feature film, Purple Rain, and a string of exciting videos. Shifting styles in ways that only rarely seemed contrived, he set certain trends, trailed after others, followed daring statements with vapid ones and, at a time when many artists were all too willing to pander, did pretty much whatever the fuck he pleased. It was heartening.

The 1980s more or less ended in January of 1989 when Ronald Reagan left office. The vicious presidential campaign of 1988-in which the Republican party gleefully played on white racial fears, wrapped its candidate, the insipid George Bush, in the flag and used McCarthyite rhetoric to make even the most centrist views seem seditiously un-American-now seems like the last dying gasps of cynical 1980s values. So far the 1990S seem as if they will be characterized by an eager sense of penitence driven by a secret fear that it really may be too late to turn things around. Suddenly, after a ten-year rape of the earth, everyone is an environmentalist, but reports on such issues as global warming, ozone depletion, waste disposal, and the pollution of oceans and rivers are increasingly dispiriting. Suddenly, after eight years of simply outrageous tax breaks for the well-to-do, everyone wants the economy to be brought under control, but the size of the deficit and the cost of the savings-and-Ioan bailout grow ever higher and seem to defy comprehension, let alone remedy. Just when we

The Eiahties

II

were happily celebrating the death of communism, capitalism teeters precariously on the verge of recession or worse. Everyone has grown more compassionate-kinder, gentler-but the staggering desperation and crushing numbers of the homeless and needy to whom the largess of the Reagan administration somehow never trickled down seem completely overwhelming. Once the hostages came home from Iran, it seemed convenient to forget about the Middle East-and American dependence on foreign oil. Now the Middle East is back on the front burner, and burning hot. The longterm implications of the war with Iraq are frightening to consider. As often happens, the uncertainty of the future has sent people scurrying to the past for reassurance. This tendency achieved a certain crazed extreme in 1989, a year that spent most of its time trying its damnedest to be I969-or at least an airbrushed version of 1969, blurring all the wrenching complexities of that year. Twenty years after Altamont, the Rolling Stones filled stadiums around the country and were the most popular show on the road. Nearly twenty years after the breakup of the Beatles, Paul McCartney dusted off a healthy bunch of Beatles songs and launched a highly successful American tour. Twenty years after they sang about how you "got to revolution," the members of Jefferson Airplane reunited for a series of shows so impossibly lame that it seemed like a Las Vegas lounge act's rendition of the greatest hits of the Summer of Love. And, of course, the twentieth anniversary of Woodstock inspired endless commentaries about the days of peace, love, and granola in the mud. Looking to the past, though, does not need to be an act of escapism or nostalgia, particularly in a country that is so extremely in need of a meaningful sense of history. An appreciation of the 1960S would be better served by allowing that decade's lessons to be enacted, not simply packaged and sold back to us as a sitcom. Those lessons are simple and important: the belief that we are not simply individuals but part of a larger culture that requires our most earnest efforts and ideas; the conviction that the worlds within and outside ourselves are subject to transformation, that our actions can shape the future, that what we choose to do matters deeply; the insistence that America has a place for our best selves, and to the degree that it doesn't, it

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must be changed; the notion that music can help formulate a vision toward which we can aspire. And if we must look back to Woodstock, remember that]imi Hendrix, the black man who closed the show that last morning, once wondered what would happen if six turned out to be nine. What if.

Robert Palmer

The Church of the Sonic Guitar

Accept that music is not sealed to passion, nor to piety, nor to feelings; accept that it can blossom in spaces so wide that your image cannot project itself within them, that it must make you melt within its unique light! -Louis Dandrel Current cosmology (the study of the universe as an ordered whole) considers that there was an original moment of creation. I propose to call that moment the "Big Ring" since the old term is modeled on the noisy violence of our own culture. At the time of the" Big Ring," unknown forces brought the universe into being. The sounding itself, the ringing of that first note is the creation, which ever since has been expanding, dividing, and echoing. It is reverberating even now. -David Hykes I had a hot blues out, man. I'd be driving my truck ... and pretty soon I'd hear it [my first electric blues hit] walking along the street, I'd hear it drivin8 along the street. . . . I would be driving home from playing, two or three o'clock in the morning, and I had a convertible, with the top back 'cause it was warm. I could hear people all upstairs playing that record. It would be rollin8 up

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there, man. I heard it all over. One time I heard it coming from way upstairs somewhere, and it scared me. I thought I had died. -Muddy Waters Guitar Slim ... was gettin' a fuzz tone distortion way before anyone else. You didn't hear it again until people like Jimi Hendrix came along. Believe it or not, Slim never used an amplifier. He always used a P.A. set, never an amplifier. He was an overtone fanatic, and he had these tiny iron cone speakers and the sound would run through them speakers and I guess any vibration would create that sound, because Slim always played at peak volume.... If Slim was playing, you could hear him a mile away. -Guitarist Earl King 'Scuse me while I kiss the sky. -Jimi Hendrix

lite electric guitar was the last crucial ingredient to find its proper niche in the fundament ofrock-&-roll-as-we-know-it. Since the 1960s, rock & roll fanatics have been, ipso facto, guitar fanatics. Whether their ideal of rock & roll heaven was Eric Clapton's blues feel, melodic invention, and tonal purity; or ]imi Hendrix's vocalizing of the instrument's expressive capabilities in the course of turning its sound into an elemental force; or the pure-toned, long-lined elegance, lyricism, and coherent thematic development of Duane Allman's marathon improvisations; or the gritty crunch and bite of Keith Richards's power chording, 1960s rockers have invariably been worshippers in the church of the sonic guitar. Post- 1960s rock has only solidified the electric gUitar's position as rock's sonic and iconographic summum bonum. Its identity as a religious emblem has become ever-more pronounced. It is impossible to hear the from-the-gut riff-thrash of Metallica, Slayer, or Megadeth without visualizing the symbol of the inverted cross and the hand sign of the double horns (representing pre-Christian nature worship and the horns of Pan, rather than the devilry of fundamentalist Christian propaganda). In what might be termed the punk art

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wing of modern rock, the sonorous resonating properties of feedbacksustained guitar textures have assumed an explicitly spiritual association through their development by bands and performers such as Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Tom Verlaine and Television, and more recently Sonic Youth. To attend a show by one of these groups is to immerse oneself in a clanging, droning sensurround of guitar harmonics, to enter a precisely demarcated, ritually invoked sonic space. This is the movable church of the sonic guitar, a vast, high-vaulted cathedral vibrating with the patterns and proportions of sound-made-solid. Perhaps the most appropriate analogue for this invisible but highly audible sacred architecture is the Gothic cathedral, designed according to traditions of mystical mathematics, such as the proportion of the golden mean. And they were designed to resonate music, specifically the chanting of monks. One finds the same sonic concerns in the sacred architecture of Islam: the courtyard of one medieval mosque was designed to resonate any sound made within it seven times, in overlapping waves of slap-back echo. And of course there are the legendary acoustical properties of Eastern structures such as the Taj Mahal. Impressively thorough sonic explorations of some of these architectural wonders have been made by composer David Hykes and the Harmonic Choir, whose album Hearing Solar Winds was recorded inside the twelfth-century Abbey of Thoronet in Provence, and by Paul Horn's solo flute recording Inside, made on the sly (without official permission) inside the Taj Mahal. Listening to these recordings at high volume must be something like experiencing Hykes's "Big Ring" from inside the sound box of a truly humongous electric guitar. This is a far from idle comparison. The acoustic gUitar's flexibility in terms of tuning made it the ideal instrumental vehicle for the nontempered, microtonal melodic language of the blues, in which key intervals such as the third, fifth, and seventh are not flatted, as a black key flats the tone of the adjacent white key on a piano, but flattened, with the degree of the flattening bearing a direct relationship to the level of emotional intensity. As among the Akan of Ghana and other tribal groups speaking pitch-tone languages, falling pitch corresponds to intensifying emotion. The electric guitar can merely make the instrument's single note lines a little louder, so that the musician

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can solo like a saxophonist or brass player. But once a certain volume threshold has been passed, the electric guitar becomes another instrument entirely. Its tuning flexibility can now be used to set up sympathetic resonances between the strings so that techniques such as open tunings and bar chords set the entire instrument humming sonorously, sustained by amplification until it becomes a representation in sound of the wonder of Creation itself-the "Big Ring." A piano, whose strings are tuned to the fractional, rationized intervals of so-called "equal temperament" (the tuning standard for most post-Bach classical music), cannot achieve this effect without being radically retuned, as modern composer La Monte Young (a founding father of the rock tradition initiated by the Velvet Underground) has done in his epic composition "The Well-Tuned Piano." But an electric guitar, properly tuned to resonate with everything from the hall's acoustics to the underlying 6o-cycle hum of the city's electrical grid, is forming its massive sound textures from harmonic relationships that already exist in nature; compare this to the arbitrary "equal temperament" system which causes decidedly unharmonious harmonic interference patterns and dissonances when certain tones are allowed to ring together. In electric music-rock & roll-one of the first proofs of this theory was the engineering experiments conducted at Chess Records in the late 1940S and early 1950S. A tile bathroom adjacent to the studio was chosen as a resonating chamber for guitar amplifiers, resulting in sounds on early records by Muddy Waters and other artists that can still raise the hairs on the back of your neck. A piano in equal temperament, placed in the same bathroom, produced nothing but a tonal muddle, so the studio john was reserved for the amps of guitarists and, occasionally, harmonica players. T-Bone Walker, the bluesman who popularized the electric guitar in his work fronting the Les Hite big band and on his signature tune "Stormy Monday," had recorded in Dallas in 1929 as Oak CliffT-Bone. His move into amplification in the mid- 1930S seems to have hardly affected the style heard on the 1929 disc, at least at first. His picking on his early and mid-1940s sides for the Black and White label was clean, with a terse, dry tone, and minimal vibrato and sustain. Of the other guitarists who first plugged in during the years 193537, Eddie Durham, who tripled as arranger, trombonist, and guitarist

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with Count Basie, contributed some bluesy solos to 1930S sides by Basie small groups featuring Lester Young. But again, though these solos could have been conceived on an acoustic guitar, they simply wouldn't have been audible in a band context without an amp. The most experimental of the early electric guitarists, as far as we can judge from the recorded evidence, was Bob Dunn, who built a pickup and patched together an amp for his lap-steel guitar while working with one of the jazziest and most musicianly of the Southwest's white western-swing bands, Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies. Dunn's solos on Brown's mid-1930S discs are so startlingly futuristic that this listener feels he has been thrust abruptly into a different century. Using his slide bar to sculpt and color horn-like melodic phrases, with apparent influences from the French gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and the leading black jazz hornmen of the day, Dunn created a revolutionary electric guitar sound that was so utterly idiosyncratic he seems to have inspired few if any imitators. The work of Bob Wills's steel guitar man, Leon McAuliffe, was much more conservative and stolidly country-swing-rooted, though McAuliffe was responsible for one electric guitar showpiece that became popular with black and white orchestras near the end of the big band era, "Steel Guitar Rag." In San Antonio Rose, his exhaustive study of the life and music of western-swing kingpin Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, Charles Townshend offers fragmentary but suggestive evidence that T-Bone Walker and Charlie Christian, the front-runners in the first generation of black electric guitarists, were inspired, at least in part, by the early amplified playing of white musicians such as Dunn and McAuliffe. Walker, who was born in 1910, and Christian, six years his junior, were friends and musical partners during the early 1930S, playing together on Texas street corners for tips, and trading licks and chord voicings. Walker's heritage was that of a classic Texas bluesman; as a child, he guided Blind Lemon Jefferson around Dallas from street corner to tavern, picking up on Jefferson's discursive, horn-like single string playing at the same time. Christian, who like Walker was from Dallas, also spent several years working out of Oklahoma City with popular territory bands like Alphonso Trent's. Though Walker has found his niche in history as the father of elec-

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tric blues guitar and Christian is revered as the first great electric guitarist in jazz, their backgrounds and teenage friendship would have outweighed any considerations of genre in their own minds; for a time they even studied with the same teacher, the otherwise obscure Chuck Richardson. In the southwest territory, blues and jazz had been intimately related from the beginning. Country bluesmen recorded with jazz band backing and learned chord voicings from more harmonically advanced jazzmen. Jazz bands regularly featured shouting blues singers like Joe Turner, and, after the mid- 1930S, bluessinging guitarists such as T-Bone Walker. Western-swing and jazz present a similar continuum on the white side of the tracks, with men like McAuliffe representing a jazzy but heavily country-inflected style, while mavericks like Dunn played a kind of pure, futuristic jazz all their own. And everyone of these players, black and white, was solidly grounded in the blues. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence of black and white players freely trading ideas and techniques, including the skills of fashioning some of the earliest homemade amplifiers and pickups. But the differences in race were keenly felt; white musicians usually got the better-paying jobs, and social custom prevented race-mixing on public bandstands. During the 1930S heyday of the swing bands, black territory outfits like Count Basie's early Kansas City combo made radio broadcasts, but white musicians got the lion's share of radio exposure. It seems likely that Walker and Christian would have heard electric lap-steel players like McAuliffe and Dunn on local radio shows. Whether this listening had any effect on their playing, aside from opening their ears to some of the possibilities of amplification, is debatable. Of all the early black electric guitarists, Basie's man Eddie Durham sounds like the most likely candidate for western-swing influences on his 1938 Commodore recordings with Basie small bands. Walker's earliest electric recordings are squarely in an updated Blind Lemon Jefferson Texas blues tradition, colored with a scattering of jazzy chord voicing he most likely picked up in Christian's company. As for Christian, he took to the amplified guitar like a duck to water, rapidly developing a fleet, horn-like style that sounds a great deal closer to the work of Basie tenorman Lester Young than it does to Bob Dunn. Christian's rhythmic flexibility and harmonic savvy made him

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one of the most popular participants in the celebrated Harlem jam sessions at Minton's that midwifed the birth of bebop. He was easily a match for Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and the other early bop firebrands. Unfortunately, most of the recordings he made before his death from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five were as a sideman with Benny Goodman, who gave his remarkable guitarist ample solo space but was prevented by his own hostility to bebop from hiring a rhythm section that could have effectively seconded Christian's flights of improvisational genius.

How loudly did these early electric guitarists play? Here, alas, the recorded evidence is practically useless. Certainly by the late 1940s, guitar bluesmen in the South and Southwest were blasting away. Sam Phillips's early 1950S recording policy at Sun, which involved capturing bluesmen playing on the equipment and at the volume they were accustomed to, leaves little doubt that in boisterous southern juke joints, amp settings were frequently turned up to 10, an impression further strengthened by some of Elmore James's early 1950S Flair and Meteor sides, recorded in Mississippi clubs and home studios with Ike Turner at the controls. Houston guitarist Goree Carter was playing jacked-up, hell-for-leather jump figures, associated later with Chuck Berry but actually derived by Berry from earlier T-Bone Walker, on his rampaging 1949 single "Rock Awhile." If one is inclined to search out "the first rock & roll record"-a dubious pursuit at best, since it all depends on how you define rock & roll-Carter's "Rock Awhile" seems a reasonable choice. The clarion guitar intro differs hardly at all from some of the intros Chuck Berry would unleash on his own records after 1955; the guitar solo work crackles through an overdriven amplifier, and the boogie-based rhythm charges right along. The subject matter, too, is appropriate-the record announces that it's time to "rock awhile" and proceeds to illustrate how it's done. To my way of thinking, Carter's "Rock Awhile" is a much more appropriate candidate for "first rock & roll record" than the more frequently cited "Rocket 88," recorded for Sam Phillips almost two years later by Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm, hiding behind the pseudonym of Jackie Brenston (the lead vocalist) and his Delta Cats. (The respective dates

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as given in discographies are "circa April, 1949" for "Rock Awhile" and 5 March 1951 for "Rocket 88," but the issue is of more interest to record collectors than to anyone else-one might as well call the first rock & roll record Trixie Smith's "My Man Rocks Me [With One Steady Roll]" from 1922, citing its unmistakable lyric intent, and be done with the whole thing.) But we were talking about electric guitars, loud electric guitars, and when they first appeared on record. If recording had simply documented the music of the juke joints and taverns, we would have examples of jacked-up guitar sizzle and the edgy hum of overdriven amps from the 1940s-the noisier the gig, the louder an electric bluesman like Muddy Waters would play, just to cut through the din. The problem was studio recording technology. Imagine a hyperamplified electric guitar blazing away in the tiny J&M studio where Fats Domino and Little Richard recorded their hits. The precise instrumental balance and exact microphone placement engineer Cosimo Matassa and the musicians had worked long and hard to perfect would have been blown away by a single guitar chord, the VU meter on the studio's primitive tape recorder would have red-lined, and a welter of distortion-not controlled distortion but noisy, cacophonous, runaway distortion-would have been the recorded result. There are, in fact, guitar solos on late 1940S and early 1950S discs cut at J&M, but the guitarists, team players to a man, simply edged up their volume controls a bit, according to a prearranged plan, and fitted their solos neatly into the ensemble textures the way horn soloists like Lee Allen did. Occasionally there is a notable exception to prevailing trends: Billy Tate's "You Told Me/' recorded atJ&M in 1955 with Fats Domino on piano, builds up to a gloriously dirty, snarling guitar solo. There were other, more deliberate exceptions, and here Chess in Chicago and Sun in Memphis led the way. Muddy Waters's early recording career at Chess is one of the earliest examples of a producer, engineer, and musician working together to create an electric guitar sound suitable to the recording medium-a sound that consciously creates the illusion of a cranked-up-to-Io juke joint guitar sound but is in fact an illusion, the guitar sound being modified not only by the amplifier but by the judicious application of both room acoustics and recording technology. When Waters came to Chess in 1947, he ini-

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tially recorded backed by piano and bass, giving his records a sound not dissimilar to the pre-World War II records of Chicago bluesmen such as Tampa Red. But Leonard Chess was an experimenter. And besides, he was a businessman-those early records didn't sell. So in April 1948 he recorded Muddy playing electric guitar with only Big Crawford's bass to back it up. The resulting record, "I Can't Be Satisfied" / "I Feel Like Going Home," was the most traditional record Waters made since arriving in Chicago as far as its basic musical materials were concerned-Delta blues the way Son House or Robert Johnson might have played it. Yet this record was something entirely new. The reactions of the record-buying public told Chess that much. The initial pressing was sold out in a matter of hours, and enterprising porters riding the Illinois Central down South from Chicago did brisk business carrying copies of the record and selling them in southern cities and towns at vastly inflated prices. The difference, of course, was amplification: not just amplification but an ingenious new way of recording voice and electric guitar and bass, and blending them together into a new sound so powerful, so vibrant with presence, it was scary-scary enough for Waters himself, driving home alone after work, to hear "people all upstairs playing that record.... One time I heard it coming from way upstairs somewhere, and it scared me. I thought I had died." The Chess repertory of idiosyncratic recording techniques grew to include using the studio's tile bathroom as a resonating chamber for guitar amps, mixing directly miked amplifier and room ambience with artificial reverb, and recording both guitar and lead vocal "hot"-so close to the upper end of the VU meter that the very loudest notes pushed the needle just a shade into the red. The records created in this way jumped out at you. They were scary enough as son8s, with their tales of hoodoo hexes and gypsy fortune-tellers. Everything about the production amplified and focused that scariness, the archetypal blues scariness of standing at a pitch-black Delta crossroads in the middle of the night, waiting for the Devil-or Legba, the Yoruba/hoodoo god of the crossroads, the opener of paths between the worlds-and feeling your blood run cold with every whispered susurration of the roadside weeds. Get a little too drunk, punch up one of those records on the jukebox, and you've got The Fear. Muddy Waters was already working in the Chicago taverns with a

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full electric band when he made those records, but Leonard Chess built up his studio sound instrument by instrument, adding Little Walter's harmonica in the summer of 1950, but not allowing him to bring his amplifier (which he'd been playing through since the 1940s) until July 1951; Jimmy Rogers's second electric guitar was added by the end of that year. By perfecting his single electric guitar sound first and then adding to the ensemble instrument by instrument, Leonard Chess showed that he was one of the first to understand the necessity of capturing the raw live sounds of electric bands on tape, and one of the most methodical as to how he went about it. Down in Memphis, Sam Phillips's approach was also methodical, though in a different way. According to Phillips, his motivation for recording the black and hillbilly combos that came trouping into his studio as soon as he opened its doors in 1950 was "the freedom we tried to give the people, black and white, to express their very complex personalities.... I just hope I was part of giving the influence to the people to be free in their expression." This motivation, or method, had certain corollaries that were part of the actual recording process: "I didn't want to get these people in some stupid-assed studio and lead them astray from what they had been used to doing. To put it another way, I didn't try to take them uptown and dress them up. If they had broken-down equipment or their instruments were ragged, I didn't want them to feel ashamed. I wanted them to go ahead and play the way they were used to playing. Because the expression was the thing. I never listened to the sound of one instrument. I listened for the effect, the total effect." An early instance of Phillips's philosophy in action was the recording of "Rocket 88" by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm in March 1951. Turner and the band had driven up to Memphis from the Delta town of Clarksdale to audition, and on the way guitarist Willie Kizart's amplifier had fallen from the top of the car. When the band set up in the studio and Kizart plugged in, the amp began emitting fuzz and crackling with static. Phillips recalls that "when it fell, that burst the speaker cone. We had no way of getting it fixed . . . . It would probably have taken a couple of days, so we started playing around with the damn thing. I stuffed a little paper in there where the speaker cone was ruptured, and it sounded good. It sounded like a saxophone. And we decided to go ahead and record."

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What Phillips fails to add is that this jury-rigged fuzztone guitar sounded good to him-an engineer at Savoy or Regal or King would probably have thrown the band out of the studio. Phillips enjoys giving an impression of himself as a more or less passive medium, ushering talented musicians in his door and giving them "the freedom . . . to express their very complex personalities." The role he played in the development of Elvis Presley shows him to have been a master psychologist as well, an impression further strengthened by his celebrated "Devil's music" argument with Jerry Lee Lewis during the recording of "Great Balls of Fire." But there is more to it than this. Stan Kesler, a canny observer of Phillips's working methods, played pedal steel guitar on early Sun country recordings, switched to bass for rock & roll sessions, helped craft early songs for Presley to record, and became a seminal Memphis producer himself, including among his triumphs Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs' "Wooly Bully." I once asked Kesler to explain Phillips's success, and he said unhesitatingly that the "very first thing to remember about Sam is that he was one hell of an engineer." Certainly Phillips was competent enough to have engineered national network radio feeds for big bands broadcasting from the posh rooftop club at Memphis's Hotel Peabody before he opened his studio. Once he secured the studio location at 706 Union-a small storefront, bigger than Cosimo's J&M in New Orleans but not by much-he began by gutting the insides and rebuilding according to his acute ear for acoustics. The studio's ceiling had a peculiar slope to it; Phillips maximized its quality as a sound resonator by installing a ceiling of corrugated tiles that was an unending line of ridges and valleys. The shape of the ceiling and the setup of the studio were augmented by an ingenious and entirely original system of "slap-back" tape echo that involved feeding the original signal from one tape machine through a second machine with an infinitesimal delay. This artificial ambience, and Phillips's exceptional ear for balancing instruments and voices, enabled him to give his artists "the influence ... to be free in their expression" while actually recording an illusory, idealized representation of their customary live sound. Phillips hadn't started his own Sun label when he recorded "Rocket 88," which was booted along by Kizart's fuzztone guitar booming out a distorted but not overloaded boogie-bass figure. Little Richard

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thought enough of "Rocket 88" some five years later to appropriate its signature riff as a lead-in to "Good Golly Miss Molly." Of more immediate interest to Phillips was the original record's commercial performance. He leased it to Chess, and it became one of the biggest r&b hits of the year, reaching Number I on the r&b charts and remaining on the charts for seventeen weeks. It was a catchy, rocking tune, but that fuzzed-out guitar doubling the boogie-bass line was clearly one of its chief selling points, the single ingredient that differed significantly from the other rocking automobile blues that were becoming popular around the same time. From then on, when Phillips was recording a blues combo, he let the guitarist wail. B. B. King's earliest recordings for Phillips have an exciting, dirty guitar tone that was smoothed out of his later records. Howling Wolf and his West Memphis-based combo, whom Sam caught one night broadcasting live on West Memphis radio station KWEM and sought out, recorded a series of blues classics at Sun. On everyone of them, guitarist Willie johnson's slashing rhythm licks and jazzy fill-in runs cut through the band sound like a hot knife through butter. When johnson really let loose-turning up his amp until it crackled, slamming out dense and distorted power chords-he kicked the band into savage overdrive. With Wolf moaning, growling, and howling his traditional Delta lyrics and punctuating the rough combo sound with harmonica wails, they sounded like a blues band from Hell. Their first single, "Moaning at Midnight" / "How Many More Years," has all the eerie hoodoo of Muddy Waters's early discs and then some. On "How Many More Years," johnson's slamming power chords crashed like thunder. On a slightly later Sun studio side, "House Rockers," Wolf kicked johnson into his guitar solo by hollering, "Play that guitar, Willie Johnson, 'till it smoke ... blow your top, blow your top, blow your TOP!" Still without a label of his own, Phillips leased these first Wolf recordings to Chess, who recognized a winner when they heard one, drove South, and spirited Wolf away to Chicago and an exclusive Chess contract. For Phillips, losing Jackie Brenston and Wolf to Chess and B. B. King to Modern/R.P.M. (whose local talent scout, Ike Turner, seemed to dog Phillips's footsteps) was devastating. Short on funds, still depending on location recordings of weddings and funer-

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als and the sort of souvenirs Elvis recorded for his mother's birthday when he first walked into Phillips's studio, Sam nevertheless started a label of his own. His first venture, the Phillips label, issued only one known release, and it was one of the loudest, most overdriven, and distorted guitar stomps ever recorded, "Boogie in the Park" by Memphis one-man-band Joe Hill Louis, who cranked his guitar while sitting and banging at a rudimentary drum kit. Finally, in 1953, Phillips launched Sun.

Among the talents attracted by Sun were two harmonica-playing singers from the West Memphis area, James Cotton and Junior Parker. Both recorded with Auburn (Pat) Hare, an Arkansas-born guitarist Phillips had been using on various recording sessions since a June 1952 date with blues singer Walter Bradford's combo. Hare was a Memphisarea guitarist cut from the same bolt of cloth as Willie Johnson. Both men were blues players to the core but had obtained some familiarity with jazzy chord voicings. Both played single-note lines in fills and solos, a staple among electric guitarists since the mid- 1940s' success of T-Bone Walker ushered in the era of electric blues guitar. But they were also slicing, savage rhythm players. Other guitarists in other towns may have developed similar ideas at the same time or even earlier, but on the basis of recorded evidence (which is just about all we have to go on), Johnson and Hare were the originators of one of the most basic gambits in the rock & roll guitarist's arsenal, the power chord. A chord-several notes harmonized and played together-can be inserted at any appropriate place in a performance. A power chord is fundamentally rhythmic rather than harmonic in purpose and character. Usually, a power chord is accented for maximum impact. As it has become a more and more venerable device in the rock & roll guitar lexicon, its uses have become more various. Figures are built around power chords, which follow one another in quick succession in an incisive, cutting riff or phrase but are rarely allowed to lose their identity as individual accents, however cleverly or densely they are strung together. If you're still not entirely sure what I'm talking about, go listen to Keith Richards's guitar figures on "Jumpin'

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Jack Flash." Richards once told me he got ideas for several of the power chord figures on Rolling Stones records from the acoustic guitar power chords that propel 1950S Everly Brothers singles like "Wake Up, Little Suzie." Robbie Robertson of The Band says he picked up the practice from hearing Willie johnson's work on the early Howling Wolf discs being broadcast over Nashville's WLAC. Although the Wolf discs from Memphis had been recorded in the early 1950S, Chess had stockpiled a number of them and released them in the late 1950S or early 1960s on the enormously influential Wolf "rocking chair" album (titled Howlina Wolfbut remembered more often for the rocking chair on the cover). But back in the Sun studios, in the years 1952-54, Pat Hare was the power chord king. One of the most gripping examples of his style was "Cotton Crop Blues," released in 1954 under vocalist james Cotton's name. Whatever equipment Hare was playing through, there must have been more wrong with it than a burst speaker cone. Rarely has a grittier, nastier, more ferocious electric guitar sound been captured on record, before or since, and Hare's repeated use of a rapid series of two downward-modulating power chords, the second of which is allowed to hang menacingly in the air, is a kind of hook or structural glue. This figure turns what could have been a merely good blues record about the indignities of a life spent picking cotton-an explanation (as if one were really needed) for the then-ongoing mass exodus of black southerners north to Chicago-into something extraordinary and unforgettable. The first heavy metal record? I'd say yes, with tongue only slightly in cheek. At the same session, or the day after (the dates are 13 and/or 14 May 1954), Hare cut a single of his own, and all the pent-up violence and emotional intensity that had been evident in his playing from the beginning came pouring out. I'm speaking of scary records: Hare's "I'm Gonna Murder My Baby" is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on a three-minute vinyl disc. Again, Hare used hard-slammed power chords to structure the half-spoken, half-sung, entirely threatening performance. His spoken asides are along the lines of "I'm gonna kill 'er tomorrow." Some years later, after playing on junior Parker's Sun and Duke sides and then moving to Chicago, Hare joined the Muddy Waters band and was reunited with his longtime partner James Cot-

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ton. Hare played on one spectacular Waters record after another between 1957 and 1960, from "She's 19 Years Old" and "Walking through the Park" (the latter has a classic Hare solo) to the Muddy Waters at Newport album of 1960, which introduced a new generation of young white rockers to electric blues and was especially influential in England among groups such as the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. And then life caught up with art: Hare was arrested, tried, and sent to prison for allegedly murdering his girlfriend. Although he was occasionally let out to play a local gig, he never finished his sentence; he died behind bars. This circumstance makes "I'm Gonna Murder My Baby" even scarier to listen to than it must have been at the time. No wonder the power chord has been most fundamental in modern rock as the basic structure for riff-building in heavy metal bands. "I'm Gonna Murder My Baby" is as heavy metal as it gets. Meanwhile, electric blues-based guitarists were barnstorming across the South, sometimes meeting in large big-city clubs for "battles of the blues" that inspired them to pull out all the stops. Of the Texas guitarists most directly influenced by T-Bone Walker, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown was either the flashiest and most resourceful user of the electric gUitar's sonic resources, or he had a particularly sympathetic recording situation at Duke/Peacock records. His early and mid-1950S singles abound in volume and sustain effects, deliberate amplifier overloading, wildly stuttering scrambles up the neck, screaming high-note sustain, and other rock & roll devices. "Dirty Work at the Crossroads" is probably the most inclusive single representation of these effects. In concert, everyone from T-Bone and Gatemouth to less renowned but no less gonzo Texans such as Goree Carter and Bobby "Blue" Bland's ace axman Wayne Bennett sometimes gave these stars a run for their money. But in the annals of early and mid- 1950S electric guitar lore, Guitar Slim's legend looms large indeed. Earl King related a typical story to interviewer Jeff Hannusch: Gatemouth Brown, T-Bone Walker, Lowell Fulson and Guitar Slim were all performing one night at the White Eagle in Opelousas, Louisiana. Slim was headlining because "The Things I Used To Do" [his 1954 r&b smash with piano and arrangement by Ray

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Charles] was a scorcher. They were all sitting in the dressing room and Guitar Slim walked up to 'em and said, "Gentlemen, we got the greatest guitar players in the country assembled right here. But when I leave here tonight, ain't nobody gonna realize you even been here." Well, they all laughed but that's exactly what happened. Slim come out with his hair dyed blue, blue suit, blue pair of shoes. He had 350 feet of mike wire connected to his guitar, and a valet carrying him on his shoulders all through the crowd and out into the parking lot. Man, he was stopping cars driving down the highway. No one could outperform Slim. Eyewitnesses also agree that nobody could outblast Slim when it came to volume. Earl King's story about Slim disdaining amplifiers and playing directly through a P.A., whose iron cone speakers would further enrich the sonic overtones of his ringing guitar strings, means in effect that he had a setup offering him virtually unlimited feedback and sustain, all of which he could rigorously control with the volume and tonal settings on the guitar itself once the P.A. was properly adjusted. "He had a lot of melodic overtones in his solos," King confirms. "Slim tuned standard, but he used that capo to get the effect of open strings.... I've seen Slim play many a time without it. He just used it for effect." And what an effect it must have been. Early and mid- 1950S r&b audiences were still accustomed to bands that featured honking saxophones as their primary solo voice, fronted by blues singers who kept their guitar work subordinate to the impact of the vocals. Slim reversed the priorities. He was a bluesman by birthright; born Eddie Jones in the Mississippi Delta town of Greenwood (or possibly Hollandale), he combined early training in gospel singing with a beginning guitar style that led early commentators to dismiss him as an imitator of T-Bone Walker and, especially, the flashier Gatemouth Brown. The blue suits, shoes, and hair, the 35o-foot guitar cords, and the Jimi Hendrix-like sonic effects soon made it clear that he was an original. In retrospect, he was every inch a rock & roller. Accounts of some of Slim's exploits are almost uncannily reminiscent of the Stones's Keith Richards. In the mid- 1970s, when I was covering part of a Stones tour for Rolling Stone, the band arrived by private jet in the early hours of the morning and checked into a Hilton

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Inn. It was one of those mammoth inside-out structures. The interior of the building was entirely hollow, and the door to each room on each of the hotel's many levels opened directly onto a balcony that ran all the way around the inside of the hotel, with parallel balconies above and below it. In other words, you could stand in the door of any room and see the door of every other room in the place. Soon, a sound began blaring out of a room across the void from mine, around fifteen stories up. It was a Fender amp and it was unmistakably Keith Richards. Before long, he emerged from his room, guitar in hand, and perched precariously on the balcony, where he kept threatening to plunge to his death but somehow never did, and he kept jamming all the while, the sound pouring out the open door of his room. Compare that to the following Earl King story from Hannusch's invaluable I Hear You Knockin': The Sound of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues: "You knew Slim was back in town [New Orleans] 'cause early in the morning, around seven-eight o'clock, if he was tanked up, you'd hear them amps and P.A. going off. People'd be calling the police, 'cause you could hear Slim three blocks away! And here's Slim up in his room with his shorts on, goin' through his stage routine.... If you went up there, there'd always be about seven or eight different women up there. He'd have his songs written with eyebrow pencil on pieces of paper tacked to the wall." When solid-body Les Pauls appeared on the market, Slim immediately realized that with a solid body guitar he could more easily control the feedback and sustain than with the electric hollow-body he had been using. According to his bandleader, Lloyd Lambert, he would also turn the bass controls on his guitar and P.A. as low as they would go and crank the treble up to 10. Lambert realized that standing in the middle of this sonic firestorm every night wasn't helping his hearing, but he couldn't tell Slim anything, either about the volume he played at or the pace at which he lived his life. By 1958, his drinking had reached a debilitating stage that made it more and more difficult for him to travel. "I wouldn't say he was a pretty good drinker," Lambert told Hannusch. "He was the best! Slim just wouldn't take care of himself. He lived fast, different women every night. I'd try and tell him to eat good and get his rest, but he'd say, 'Lloyd, I live three days to y'all's one. The world don't owe me a thing when I'm

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gone.' " He died in New York in February 1959 at the age of 32, from bronchial pneumonia complicated by alcoholism. If Slim was one of rock & roll's original Kings of Excess, and the first saint in the Church of the Sonic Guitar, he was also, during his lifetime, a nightmare to record. One of the most hauntingly beautiful of his sides, the 1952 "Feeling Sad," has no guitar on it at all, but the purity and passion of its down-home gospel vocal, the plaint of a soldier in Korea that "I was sending you my money baby, and all the time you was doin' me wrong," make listening to it an experience not likely to be forgotten. Slim began recording for Specialty in 1953, scoring almost immediately with the biggest hit of his career and one of the top r&b records of 1954, "The Things I Used to Do." But Specialty's Art Rupe and his man in New Orleans, Johnny Vincent, later the colorful proprietor of his own Ace label, had little patience for a guitarist who would wait patiently while studio balances were carefully adjusted, wait for the count-off, and then jack his amplifier right on up to 10. If Spinal Tap had already invented the Number II amp setting, there is little doubt that Slim would have used it, anywhere, anytime. The Guitar Slim album issued by Specialty in the United States some years ago is a major disappointment. Not only was Slim's guitar deliberately buried in some of the original mixes, but some selections had questionable additions, such as organ and vocal chorus overdubs after Slim's death. Finally, in 1984, England's Ace label leased the original tapes from Specialty and turned them over to the superb remastering engineer Bob Jones. Jones was able to strip away the later additions, bring up the guitar, give its sound more presence and bite, and generally restore the performances to at least some semblance of the artist's original intent. For listeners interested in the roots of rock guitar, the British Ace label's Guitar Slim: The Thin8s I Used to Do, is required listening. Among its highlights, "The Story of My Life" has a thrilling guitar solo that rings out proudly, with Jones's remastering bringing out every nuance of phrasing and tonal subtlety. One album isn't much, but it's an album I, for one, wouldn't be without. Earl King was not simply Slim's traveling companion and posthumous keeper of the flame. He was and is a formidably talented

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singer, songwriter, and guitarist in his own right; his New Orleansmade singles of the late 1950S and early 1960s are themselves solid links in the rock-into-soul chain. And like many talented performers of the time, King paid his dues by sometimes being called in at the last minute to impersonate an indisposed star at an already booked engagement. In this case, the star was Guitar Slim, and King reportedly was every bit as convincing as James Brown or Otis Redding impersonating Little Richard. But King also left us a recording legacy that helps put Slim's true contribution to the music in perspective. His 1960-62 sessions for the Imperial label, which include some of his most accomplished and enduring compositions in "Trick Bag" and "Mama and Papa," also include a modern reinterpretation of Slim's "The Things I Used to Do." More important, these sessions yielded a classic two-part single that is, in effect, the missing link between Slim and modern rock guitar, "Come On," an irresistibly funky dance tune highlighted by a riveting, extended guitar solo. King begins playing bluesy, more like the Slim we know from records, but he soon begins to stretch up to screaming, liquid high-note phrases that are uncannily reminiscent of Hendrix's recordings made more than five years later. There can be little doubt that Hendrix, a veteran of the r&b circuit with stints backing Little Richard and the Isley Brothers to his credit, heard "Come On" and took its lessons to heart. Not only did he build a certain aspect of his style from King's revolutionary, screaming high-note melismata, he also recorded his own versions of Guitar Slim's "The Things I Used to Do" and Earl King's "Come On," thus forging another link in the chain, and explicitly laying bare the roots of his art as they extend back through King to Guitar Slim to the likes of Gatemouth Brown to the father of electric blues guitar, T-Bone Walker. Working the other way from the watershed of Hendrix's brief but brilliant career, we can follow this influence into the work of every accomplished rock guitarist playing today. This is what we mean when we call rock & roll a living tradition.

If Guitar Slim is the patron saint of our Church of the Sonic Guitar, Ike Turner can only be its fallen angel, the Dark Prince. Most of the publicity he has received in recent years has had to do with

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cocaine, alleged gangsterism, and his supposed physical and mental cruelties to Tina Turner; emerging as the long-suffering Angel of her New Morning, Tina has painted Ike as her Lucifer, in the original sense of the light-bringer. Light, in the form of musical tutelage and inspiration, he certainly gave, but like all who mess with the Lucifer of legend, Tina paid a heavy price. Whether th~ story is as cut-anddried and morally unambiguous as ~rina's confessional bio and celebrity interviews have made it appear need not concern us here. Ike's character certainly has a bearing on his importance as an originator of sonic-stun flash-blues guitar. His personal life is his own business. Indisputably, Turner was a young man of more than average intelligence, resourcefulness, musical acumen, and business savvy. Born in Clarksdale, Mississippi (the Delta town that gave us John Lee Hooker, Sam Cooke, and from its immediate outskirts the likes of Muddy Waters) on 5 November 1932, Ike could easily have grown up a conventional bluesman, learning from his elders and forging his own style from traditional elements in the time-honored tradition. He did seek out his elders, taking early piano lessons from musicians such as King Biscuit Time ivory-tickler Pinetop Perkins, and gleaning lessons and advice from the formidable Sonny Boy Williamson II. But when he was in high school, the fast-talking, smooth-dressing Turner landed a regular disc jockey slot on Clarksdale radio station WROX. On his show he played the latest jumping r&b discs from Los Angeles and New York, as well as from Chicago and closer to home, listening carefully and developing a musical orientation more influenced by the energy and ferment of the late 1940S national r&b scene than by Delta doings. While in high school, he also joined the Tophatters, a student big band drawn together by their love of modern jazz. As so many black performers had discovered so many times, there was little money to be made playing modern jazz-especially in Clarksdale, Mississippi. So Ike and a few of his closest musical cohorts from the Tophatters broke off and formed the Kings of Rhythm. All of them were capable interpreters of deep Delta blues, but being younger and having been at work assiduously expanding their musical horizons and slicking up their image, they preferred playing jumping band blues with a rocking boogie beat and a section of riffing,

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big-toned saxophones. Ike himself played piano; the guitarist, Willie Kizart, was the son of a well-known Delta blues pianist, Lee Kizart, and the guitar pupil of one of the area's earliest musical modernists, Earl Hooker. With this band, Turner recorded a number of sides for Sam Phillips, including the 1951 Number 1 r&b hit "Rocket 88" that Little Richard was to find so inspiring five years later. But to this band of bright young upstarts local opportunities for regular work and growth seemed as limited as Sun Records's erratic distribution. After spending the early years of the 1950S doubling as a musician and record company talent scout (he recorded B. B. King, Junior Parker, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Howling Wolf, and others at the beginning of their careers, often at his Clarksdale radio station gig or in a studio he'd rigged up in his own house in Clarksdale), Turner reformed the temporarily dormant Kings of Rhythm and moved the entire group to St. Louis in mid- 1954. Like Memphis, St. Louis was a mecca for black southerners who'd hoed one too many rows of cotton and had boasted a vital and diverse black music scene since the 1920S. By 1955 two St. Louis bands were running neck and neck as local favorites-the Kings of Rhythm and Chuck Berry's trio. Possibly their closest competition was another transplanted Mississippian who was to become one of the most durable and influential blues guitarists of the 1960s, Albert King. But King, whose fluid phrases moved like oil oozing over stone and cut with a deceptively relaxed-sounding viciousness, appealed mostly to a somewhat older blues crowd. Turner and Berry were competing for the patronage of all-nighters in St. Louis, and the wideopen East St. Louis, Illinois, just across the river, where the clubs opened when the Missouri clubs shut down and kept rocking into the morning hours. Turner and Berry were also in competition for the growing white audience then beginning to embrace rocking black r&b, and were great favorites with the white teen crowd at spots like George Edrick's Club Imperial. Bill Stevens, then a white teenager planning to go into his father Fred's paint business, remembered his St. Louis club-hopping days recently for British interviewer Bill Greensmith, the most thorough historian of the St. Louis scene:

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"There were about three of us who bummed together when we were kids," he said. "And we couldn't get served in the white tavern but we could get served in the black tavern-we were underage. So these fellows were all playing at your local clubs on the east side, Ike included. They would come over and play at the Imperial or the [other] clubs in St. Louis until 1 o'clock in the morning, then they would go over to the east side and start playing at I: 30 and play to daylight. And this is where we all ended up. Kingsbury's is actually where Ike got his start-Kingsbury'S Lounge. Very nice couple-older. Miss Kingsbury was a friend of my mother's maid and that being the case I could get away with being in there and sit there all night, drink and listen to the music, get involved with it. I enjoyed the music, enjoyed the partyin' . To me it was good times." Stevens and his father became so enthusiastic about the local music scene, and the lack of local recording activity, that they started Stevens Records in the late 1950S, recording some wild and crazy instrumental and vocal burners by Ike Turner and other St. Louis luminaries. Because Turner was still under contract to Sun as a recording artist, his agreement having a few more months to run, he appeared on Stevens as Icky Renrut. At first, Turner and the band lived in a big house, where allnight partying never seemed to keep him from waking everyone up in the morning and organizing a highly efficient rehearsal with a single-minded authority and military approach to organization that probably makes James Brown his only real rival in the field of bandleader martinets. But everyone agreed that the rehearsals were worth it-the band was tiaht, as can be heard on a series of recordings made between 1955 and 1959. By this time, with the help of lessons from Willie Kizart and, undoubtedly, a great deal of practice, Turner had transformed himself from a pianist into a gonzo guitarist. Sam Phillips's memories of his early 1950S Sun sessions, not surprisingly, reveal that already "Ike had the best-prepared band that ever came in and asked me to work with them. And," he added, "Ike! What a piano player he was! People don't know that Ike Turner was the first standup piano player. Man, he could tear a piano apart and put it back

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together again on the same song." But this was nothing compared to the over-the-top ravings Turner unleashed on electric guitar when the Kings of Rhythm traveled to Cincinnati to record for Federal in August and September of 1956. Turner projected a flashy, bad-ass persona. Guitarist Bobby King, who was playing around St. Louis in 1957, recalls that Ike was never performing, he always had the band performinghe would always be back in the crap game shooting dice with a whole lot of money-$1500-$16oo. I'd never seen that much money in my life! He was always the sharp guy and ... he kept his band clean and sharp, beautiful suits and attire, they were always together. Ike always had a good band and a variety of vocalists, he had a hell of a reed section, they were some of the leading sax players in the city. There was also his carefully cultivated sharpie/hustler image, his evil look (practiced, perhaps, in front of a mirror?), and his reputation for getting the most out of his musicians by any means necessary: one of his singers from the St. Louis days, Bobby Foster, remembers that Turner "told me he was gonna stick the guitar up my ass if I didn't do it right. And he was serious." Turner and the Kings of Rhythm already had a fearsome reputation around St. Louis when they took off for Cincinnati to record for Federal, the biggest label they'd yet worked for. After absorbing the basics of blues guitar technique from Willie Kizart, Turner became fascinated by the tremolo or "whammy bar" that was a new technological innovation on certain solid-body electric guitars. The player struck a note or chord with his right hand, then quickly reached down and gave the curved metal bar sticking out of the sound box near the bridge a nice energetic shake that shivered the note or chord with a vibrato-like quaver, the degree of vibrato and distortion depending on how violently the guitarist manhandled both the bar and his strings. Turner manhandled with a crazed abandon that belies his cooler-than-cool image, and that must have been something to see in the studio. On Federal sides like "I'm Tore Up," featuring vocalist Billy Gayles,

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and the steamroller rockers "Sad as a Man Can Be" and "Gonna Wait for My Chance," with singing by Jackie Brenston of "Rocket 88" fame, Turner unleashed his full power, wresting twisted, tortured, bent, and shattered blues notes and chords out of his guitar not just for emphasis but in practically every bar of every solo. This was a wildness that simply hadn't been heard before, one well ahead of its timethe whammy bar's heyday in the late 1950S and early 1960s never produced music approaching such savage urgency. Overtones rang out bell-like, only to be shattered by violent manipulations of the whammy bar, giving way to lines of screaming high notes that began sounding bluesy and then began bending and distorting themselves until the guitar sounded, for a moment, like a primitive synthesizer. Several additional examples of Turner's playing from this period are, if anything, even more gonzo. Tommy Louis's furiously rocking "Wail Baby Wail," a shouter in the Little Richard mode, sets up a guitar solo that seamlessly blends the then-popular Chuck Berry intro-andbreak style with all the furious string-bending and whammy-barring of which Turner was capable, suggesting at least some stylistic connection between the two doyens of mid-1950S St. Louis guitar, Berry and Turner. In 1958, Turner and at least some members of his band were in Chicago doing session work as well as their own records for the somewhat shady Cobra/Artistic operation, whose owner reportedly lost the company in a poker game. In any event, Turner showed up playing one of two electric lead guitars on "Double Trouble," the first recorded masterpiece by one of the greatest of all modern blues guitarists, Otis Rush. Rush's eerie moan about hard times and hoodoo paranoia is punctuated by his own crying, fluid phrases, and periodically the mood escalates from dread to pure terror as Turner inserts a quivering shard of a glassy blues chord. "Double Trouble" is the single most striking performance in a series of Otis Rush Cobra sides that later played a key role in inspiring the British blues revival. A comparison of Rush's original" All Your Love" with the John Mayall/ Eric Clapton version reveals the latter as a nearly literal homage, and Led Zeppelin was only marginally more creative in their remake of "I Can't Quit You Baby." By 1958, Ike Turner had discovered Annie May Bullock, a.k.a. Tina Turner, and from that time on he became the Svengali behind her,

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directing the band with his usual iron-fisted methods and parading Tina in her skimpy costumes like a pimp displaying the merchandise. His guitar playing receded into the background, although there is one fascinating album of guitar instrumentals by Turner on the Crown label, and he plays a mean blues solo on a live Ike and Tina performance in Africa captured in the film Soul to Soul. Since then, there's been a well-publicized split, accusations, arrests. It's too bad, because Ike Turner deserves a prominent place in rock & roll history, and not just as a guitarist whose wildman strategies were rarely heard again until the advent of the Velvet Underground and later punk groups like Richard Hell and the Voidoids, with equally gonzo, equally resourceful guitarist Robert Quine. Turner's remarkable accomplishments as a talent scout, the classic blues records he produced in the early 1950S for the Modern label, his bands, Ike and Tina albums, spin-off projects-all add up to a rich and varied career. Suspected criminal or even psychopathic tendencies should have nothing to do with it-what about Pat Hare's chillingly fulfilled prophecy of "I'm Gonna Murder My Baby," something Ike Turner has never been accused of doing, though he may have tried? Forget it. Art is art, and great rock & roll is great rock & roll no matter what kind of maniac is playing it. What matters, in this necessarily brief and fragmented account of the rise of sonic guitar, is that virtually every innovation associated with rock guitar playing in the 1960s can be traced back to black musicians of the middle and late 1950s-from the "heavy" sound and power chording of men like Willie]ohnson and Pat Hare to proto-funk rhythms, from the "black rockabilly" and rhythm guitar styles derived from gospel-trained players to the sainted founder of our Church of the Sonic Guitar.

Trent Hill The Enemy Within: Censorship in Rock Music in the 1950s

~e

traditional approach to censoring the objectionable in the realm of "high" culture tends to pit the heroic censor and the forces of the Good against the transgressing and villainous autonomous producer/ author. The very structure of the opposition suggests its weakness; it is all too easy to reverse the valences of the opposition, so that the producer becomes a heroic soul attempting to stand up to the censor, who has all the machinery of state repression on his side. The writer working in solitude is a sympathetic figure; his book may represent the work of years, presenting itself as a compelling vision that must be respected, even if it cannot be accepted, by its audience. Moreover, prosecuting literary obscenity cases in trial is something of a nightmare; in order to win such cases, the prosecution has to establish that the work in question is both obscene and utterly lacking in any redeeming social value. And as has been shown repeatedly since the 19305, the brute fact that obscenity trials gather into a courtroom a group of educated, authoritative

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voices who have definite arguments about the worth of a work tends to establish the worth of a work, and therefore its right to be disseminated. So literary obscenity prosecutions generally undermine the very social and legal consensuses upon which they are supposedly based, and ironically establish the validity of and interest in the very works they are meant to proscribe. On the other hand, there are many reasons why, for shrewd censors in the 1950S, pop cultural productions seemed such an appealing aesthetic, ideological, and political target. It is harder to argue that rock & roll records are the productions of a heroic creator; they cannot support the myth of either the autonomous author or the autonomous auteur. The material conditions of pop culture production are more readily apparent; even the most naive fan knows that pop culture creators are deeply dependent on the material support of complicated corporate networks for their success, and that they are indeed the products of these same networks. Senators at the 1960 "payola" hearings would find that the pop star Fabian served as a double indictment of the recording industry: he was notorious for lacking anything resembling raw musical talent, but was attractive, charismatic, and marketable. Fabian's recording company therefore took great pains to use every means available to mask the many flaws in his voice, proving to the assembled senators both that he was simply a creation of the recording industry and that the record companies were force-feeding the American public inferior music. Another advantage in pop culture productions, from the point of view of censorious power, is that in general they do not take long to produce, and their techniques of production are closely aliglled with the technologies of mass production. Relative to "objectionable" literature, the character of pop culture productions as a commodity is easier to establish, and it is therefore easier to tar them with the brush of Mammon. Indeed, the accusation "they're only in it for the money" forms a litany intoned by censors from Senator Kefauver in 1954 up to Paula Hawkins's contemptuous dismissal of Frank Zappa at the Parents' Music Resource Committee hearings in 19 85: SENATOR HAWKINS:

MR. ZAPPA:

you do make a profit from the sales of rock records? Yes.

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The Enemy Within

SENATOR HAWKINS:

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Thank you. I think that statement tells the story to the committee. Thankyou. 1

But this aesthetic/ideological problem presents censors with a substantive practical problem as well: it is not so easy to censor these cheap gauds, since they multiply so easily and rapidly. The task of censoring them demands a radically different strategy from that of censoring "high" cultural productions, and therefore they have typically been the subject of a different kind of censorship than have novels and movies. It is relatively easy to stop the dissemination of a novel or a movie by direct means, by intercepting and proscribing it in a series of judicial and police actions, because their mode of production is intensely organized and hierarchical; the censor has available to him efficient points of intervention by which to stop the publication and dissemination of the outlaw text. Rock & roll records are products of a much less highly organized system of production. A single individual could perform a variety of functions in different places in an amorphous, loosely defined productive network. Dick Clark, for instance, was at the same time disc jockey, label owner, TV star, songwriter, publisher, and part-owner of a record-pressing plant. And, arguably, 1950S rock & roll relied much less on publicity and much more on presentation. You did not hear the new single advertised on the radio, but heard the song itself. A would-be censor could not easily point to any place in the network at which the entire flow of texts or records could be stopped. Confronted with the bewildering concatenation of individuals and businesses with different stakes and functions in the record industry, the congressional investigators looking into the intricacies of payola in early 1960 could only imagine that the whole thing ran by a mixture of luck, fraud, and conspiracy. Indeed, one way to read the payola hearings is as an attempt-an attempt that was ultimately successful-to force a greater degree of organization and hierarchical responsibility onto the record industry so that the flow of music/product could be more easily regulated. The censorship of pop culture-or at least those efforts at censoring it that have proven successful-has relied largely on the methods and strategies that we have come to associate with McCarthyism: the direct confrontation between the censor and the accused in a court

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of law, or before a duly empowered commission, not in order to legitimate the political repression of isolated individuals, but to mandate the social and economic repression of an entire system of material and cultural production. 2 Which is to say, to draw on a contemporary example, that it was inevitable that Luther Campbell, the voice of 2 Live Crew, would be found innocent in court; it is not inevitable, however, that his distributors will be found innocent; and it is even less inevitable that retailers will choose to continue to carry such a controversial product. 3 Censors since the 1950S have consistently relied less on the legal supports for censorship and political repression that exist within the body of American common law (and these supports, even if they are contested, are still quite substantial), than on the ability of censors to draw on the resources for repression that exist in the American discursive body politic and to identify successfully those critical economic nexuses, where pop culture's mode of production "comes together," so that they may be severed and so that the noise, be it audio or visual, may be silenced. In many ways, the censor cannot be contented by establishing this peaceful community. Censorship battles have the effect of exposing, not just the enemy within, but a whole set of cultural power relations and antagonisms. Censorship is always, in the end, an elite response to a politically threatening situation, a profound if not always articulate mode of cultural criticism. It is the least democratic kind of criticism, one that few of us can indulge in. It is the response of a person or a group who has access to money and power and the splendid variety of "bully pulpits" that money and power can buy; it is the response of the responsible, of those who can make decisions as to what can and will be disseminated, who can defend these decisions if they are contested, and who can enforce these decisions (or see to it that they are enforced) once they have been made. Censors almost never claim to enjoy what they feel compelled to do; their task is always an unpleasant one, always one that they would rather not have to perform. They would much prefer it if people were reasonable enough and responsible enough to practice self-censorship. No, these messy spectacles of court trials, congressional oversight hearings, trustees' board meetings, and the like are things that the censors, those most sensitive antennae of the Good and the Proper, would rather avoid

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having to put themselves and us through. Perhaps this delicacy shows consideration for the feelings of the silenced, and a desire to avoid the public exposure that these proceedings inevitably bring. Perhaps, on the other hand, it has more to do with a desire to avoid exposure of the antagonisms that give rise to the insecurities, along with the ambiguity of outcome once the spectacle of antagonism is made public. If it is made public. No, it is better if these things are decided in the privacy of the corporate office or, even better, in the silent star-chamber of the human heart. That way, there can be an end to all the uncertainty, a "resolution" of all these conflicts, before they even arise.

What we should notice first about early rock & roll music is that it was less a breakthrough at the level of musical form or language than a series of transformations in the way in which popular music was produced and disseminated. Some of these transformations are chiefly technological and economic in nature; the demise of radio as a medium for the presention of dramatic and theatrical material after the advent of TV created a space that could be filled by music. Likewise, the development of the vinyl record, which could be produced more cheaply than the older shellac discs, enabled small record companies to spring up with greater ease and made it easier to release a variety of records. Yet these changes in the technical and economic infrastructure of the music business are not so important for the development of both rock & roll and the reaction to it as are changes in the classspecific character of music dissemination. Rock & roll is a hybrid of early 1950S blues, r&b (the sophisticated, dance-oriented rhythm & blues that was popular among urban blacks), and country music (then known as "folk" or "hillbilly" music: it, too, was essentially a dance music). These Ur-musics were well established among groups that did not bear the full burden of the campaigns of repression: poor and working-class blacks and whites. 4 They were both the chief producers and the chief consumers of these musics, which were profitable genres that represented economically important submarkets and socially important subcultures. Before World War II, the primary

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markets for these musics, and therefore the only places where they could readily be heard, were the South and select urban areas where blacks had migrated in search of better economic opportunities. During the war, however, these opportunities spread and diversified geographically, luring southerners of both races up to the cities of the industrialized North and West. As a result, these culturally homesick internal immigrants set up a demand for the music that they knew, and worked unselfconsciously to disseminate it and generalize the demand for it. But even though both country and blues musics were growing in popularity, they were still considered to be class- and race-specific. This specificity was not merely a specificity of marketing categories, but of cultural sanction and meaning as well; it would not be considered wholly proper for a "cultured," urban, middle-class white teenager to listen to (or, heaven forbid, dance to) Hank Williams or Muddy Waters, no more so than it would have been for him or her to hang out on the street corner, fornicate, shoot pool, or read Tales from the Crypt. In spite of the cultural interdictions placed upon them-or perhaps because of these interdictions-the musics powerfully appealed to the thoroughly silenced majorities of young people in the 1950S: they defined spaces in which teenagers could exercise the body and, to a limited extent, indulge its sexuality. In short, you could dance to them. They had a powerful, pulsing beat, unlike most mainstream white popular music of the early 1950S. Their problem was that if you liked them, you could hear them only with difficulty, only if you were either lucky enough to live within range of any of the small radio stations that served the market for "race" music, or if you were willing to go to record stores in those parts of town where the primary market for these musics lived, the home of those cultural Others of the McCarthy era. There was, in the 1950S, both a cultural and economic space waiting to be filled, a kind of sociopolitical poem waiting to be written, driven on one side by the possibility of a market for a new, strange (or estranged) commodity, and on the other side by an imperative that developed in response to the stifling range of controls placed on American society by the political projects of McCarthyism and the campaign to eradicate juvenile delinquency. And it is

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striking how achieving this poem required no new theory or ideology of language-musical, modernist, or other-to transform utterly the cultural landscape of 1950S America. What it did require was that people in positions of institutional, cultural, and economic power serve as vectors for this new virus: that they disseminate the music, establish networks for its distribution, and argue for its legitimacy. A rich variety of people was willing to step into this role in the mid-1950S. There were disc jockeys, such as Alan Freed, a man who was even better equipped for his chosen role as cultural and ideological nightmare for the scared American middle class than was William Gaines, Jr.;5 there were record-label owners, such as the Chess brothers at Chess Records, and Sam Phillips at Sun Records, who were sensitive to the opportunities for disseminating a music that seemed bound to a specific market into other sectors of the culture and the economy; and, finally, there were the musicians, who at times seemed less like messengers of a deliberately bold new musical message than accidents of a fate they did not control. And it is rather fitting that they were "accidents"; they were manipulators of musical codes that predated them temporally and transcended them culturally. If any of these agents of social and musical catalysis were "original," it was in their ability to reorganize existing material and discursive networks into new configurations, thereby demonstrating that there were some limited spaces of freedom available to Americans living in that most proper decade. The early career of Elvis Presley is the perfect example of these new, culturally subversive affiliations. The son of hardscrabble working-class parents, steeped in a musical background of blues, country, and gospel musics, Elvis became an example of (and an example for) crypto-delinquents, who would ultimately seem to include just about everybody: "Those who dress sharply, 'hip,' and 'jazzy,' and affect 'off-beat' haircuts." He was positioned to do so in part by virtue of his background and his abilities, but perhaps even in larger part because Sam Phillips, who seems in retrospect perhaps the closest thing America has had to a prophet in the twentieth century, saw that the children of Tail Gunner Joe and Dr. Wertham were ready to hear a white man sing "with the Negro sound and the Negro feel." 6 Rock & roll music established social contexts in which subterra-

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nean social forces could assert themselves, find an outlet for expression, and resolve their various antagonisms (or, perhaps, reinforce these antagonisms). Just as all of these forces were not "progressive," neither were all of these resolutions. But that is not what is at issue in the movements to contain rock & roll; the issue is that these various contending tendencies were given a voice, that they came into the open, established connections, and found reinforcement for their sense and practice of applied (if unreflective) antinomianism: rock & roll seemed to call for a realignment of energies at both the psychic and social levels. While that may have been fine for the kids, for their parents and the other authorities rock & roll was a threatening reminder of the existence of others and otherness that set a dangerous precedent that had to be examined, understood, criticized, and controlled. Gertrude Samuels, writing for the New York Times Ma8azine, stated what was the critical question that parents, congressmen, preachers, and other wielders of power and authority deliberated, at times obsessively, throughout the mid-to-Iate 1950S: "What is it that makes teen-agers ... throw off their inhibitions as though at a revivalist meeting?"? The answer to this question-and the implications drawn from it-took many forms: (I) The Beat. Both its admirers and detractors agreed that one characteristic defined rock & roll as a musical genre (even if they disagreed as to whether or not it was truly music): its beat. It was the beat-repetitive, powerful, and pulsating-that both energized the kids and enraged the censorial Mammadaddy. Alan Freed's understanding of the beat was relatively historical and complex: "It began on the levees and plantations, took in folk songs, and features blues and rhythm. It's the rhythm that gets the kids. They are starved for music they can dance to after all those years of crooners." 8 The music was always described in terms of its beat; the only question was whether this beat bore with it a positive or negative ideological valence. Not all the authorities shared Freed's optimism. According to one "expert," the dancing inspired by rock & roll was "primitive," of a sort that "demonstrated the violent mayhem long repressed everywhere on earth"; in conclusion, he warned that if "we cannot stem the tide with its waves of rhythmic narcosis and of future waves of vicarious craze, we are preparing our own downfall in the midst of

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pandemic funeral dances."9 If this piece of Cold War era "expertise" strikes us as a finely wrought bit of hysteria, we should note that this hysteria in the face of the beat, along with the confused network of middle-class anxieties that made it seem like a sensible reaction, was quite widespread among critics of rock & roll, and indeed has continued as a theme in criticism right up to the present day. According to Allan Bloom, rock & roll is indeed no more and no less than the savage and primitive rhythm of darkest Africa; furthermore, "[y]oung people know that rock has the beat of sexual intercourse." 10 Much of the fear associated with rock & roll did in fact derive from its mimetic affinities to sex, and the associated fears that it (and the culture that surrounded it) encouraged and legitimated sex outside of marriage. Yet there were other anxieties that attended to the beat. It worked to consolidate large, amorphous gatherings of youth (as well as the even larger, amorphous culture of youth), providing 1950S teenagers with a cultural focus that encompassed wide areas of appearance, attitude, and behavior. Some observers thought that this power of the music proved that it was a new form of mind control with dangerous affinities to fascism. Herbert von Karajan, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, was precisely vague when he summarized all of these anxieties in his attempt at "explaining" rock & roll: "Strange things happen in the blood stream when a musical resonance coincides with the beat of the human pulse." II Even within the music business, there was much anxiety about the new music (which was really not so new after all). In an influential unsigned article in its 23 February 1955 issue, the editors of Variety magazine issued "A Warning to the Music Business." The occasion for this warning was the sudden popularity of r&b songs, such as "Sixty-Minute Man" and "Work with Me, Annie," whose rhythms underscored the scantily clad sexual message of the lyrics-or, as the editors described them, "leer-ics": What are we talking about? We're talking about "rock & roll," about "hug," and "squeeze," and kindred euphemisms which are attempting a total breakdown of all reticence about sex. 12 The record labels most widely associated with the dissemination of all these "blue notes" were the smaller labels, such as King and Im-

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perial, that were "heedless" of responsibility, as might have been expected, since they did not operate within the social and ideological boundaries of respectability as defined by the legitimate major labels. But major labels were guilty of the same sins as the independent operators, and were, due to the greater degree of trust and responsibility invested in them as known quantities, even "gUiltier" in a large social sense. The effect of the Variety editorial (and a similar one that ran in Billboard magazine) was immediate and striking, at least at the level of the grand sociopolitical gesture. Some newspapers reprinted parts of it and added their voices to the call for cleanliness on the nation's airwaves. Record labels disavowed that they ever intentionally released discs that contained double entendres, and fell all over themselves endorsing Variety's position. The Boston Catholic Youth Organization began to police record hops (which were suspected of providing fronts for illicit sexual behavior) and monitor radio stations more closely. And, while Boston has traditionally been the site of the most extreme episodes of censorship (going back to the banning of John Cleland's Memoirs), stations all across the country announced that they would no longer program "off-color" records. 13 (2) junale Strains. These records were "off-color" in both the moral and the racial sense; while sexually frank lyrics had long been accepted in r&b songs, it was only when these records became objects of consumption for white kids that anybody (least of all Variety magazine) had any kind of problem with them. According to the February 1955 piece in Variety, music of the past contained the same kinds of coded reference to matters sexual; the "only difference is that this sort of lyric then was off in a corner by itself. It was the music underworld-not the mainstream." Its success, that is, established its guilt, identified it as a threat, and demonstrated the necessity of controlling it. This new outbreak of cultural miscegenation could only spell trouble for white America, which lived in a guilty fear of African-Americans and their culture. Guilty, because of the growing consensus that racism and segregation were evils that had to be remedied; fear, because this culture of poverty was ambiguously coded as a source of both liberation and delinquency. It (and its musical expressions) stood for what was, in McCarthyite America, coded as

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"primitive." Beyond the reach of modern society, deemed too unimportant to warrant direct surveillance by those in positions of power and responsibility, African-American culture seemed to be a repository where sexuality, supposedly untouched by social convention and bourgeois ethics that allowed it to function only within marriage and property relations, flourished unfettered. White intellectuals found this repository irresistible. According to Norman Mailer, ... the Negro had stayed alive and begun to grow by following the need of his body where he could.... [T]he Negro ... could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence. 14 And of course this valorization of the Negro as culturally independent comes through to some degree in Alan Freed's defense of rock & roll. The music that "began on the levees and plantations" was to be the means by which teenagers could be restored to their bodies in the vehicle of the dance. Not everybody in white, middle-class America-the ruling class that supplied society with its ruling ideas-took very kindly to this democratic and market-driven Negrification of its youth. One of its responses was only somewhat more subtle than it was doomed: record companies, concerned with the economic and ideological viability of marketing yowling black folk to white kids, originally sought to allay their fears and the fears of parents by having "safe" white songsters produce dessicated cover versions of the real Negro thing. But these ersatz productions were not successful for long: Pat Boone was not Little Richard, and despite all apparent similarities, the song they sang was not the same, even if the title of both of their records was "Tutti Frutti," their chord progressions the same; and their lyrics identical. In addition, pvert racism was at least occasionally an important component in white American power's reaction. Some whites felt that the goal of the Negro was to overrun the white race by a long campaign of miscegenation. According to Edwin White, a member of

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the Mississippi House, "the normal and inevitable result through the years will be intermarriage and a mix-breed population." IS Some white southerners felt that rock & roll music was a part of this campaign, and traced the music's popularity to part of a fiendish plot by the NAACP to "infiltrate" southern white teenagers. In Birmingham, Alabama, the local White Citizen's Council petitioned juke box owners to remove the "immoral" records, which were "the basic, heavy-beat music of Negroes [that] appeals to the base in man, brings out animalism and vulgarity." The author of that description, Asa Carter, was an authority on the music based on his having "swung a few niggers [him]self." As might have been expected from such an organization, the White Citizen's Council immediately put their theory into practice; the day after this proclamation, a few of its members rushed the stage at a whites-only Nat King Cole concert, assaulting the singer and injuring him slightly before they were dragged off the stage. 16 This episode suggests something that is, so far as I know, unique to rock & roll among forms of pop culture: it has throughout its career been identified with social movements and tendencies that represent the boundaries of the permissibly progressive (which is what the civil rights movement was in the 1950S). It is perhaps this political affiliation that the music has maintained up until the present, and what has spared it from the severe and overt repression that some other pop culture forms (such as movies and comic books) have faced during the same time period. Indeed, all of the rock and rock-related records that have been brought to trial for or accused of obscenity in the 1980s-from the Dead Kennedys' In God We Trust, Inc., to N.W.A's AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted, to 2 Live Crew's As Nasty as They Wanna Be-have been defended and acquitted on grounds that they are political discourses and are protected as such under current law. If rock & roll was identified with the expansion of rights for AfricanAmericans during the 1950S, we must not overlook the fact that this identification was not unambiguously positive, even in the more liberal sectors of the society. The history of exclusion that Mailer draws on is one rich in consequences: if the Negro is a repository of drives

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excised from white America by means of the methodical application of paranoia, the Negro has been freed from this fate by an economic and social exclusion that has made him a victim of poverty and a candidate for delinquency. Most of the positive, liberating characteristics that Mailer uses to define his white/black hipster are, after all, characteristics that would mark a white teenager as a delinquent. And African-Americans were always regarded in the 1950S as a group "at risk" for delinquency; it was their schools that had the most problems with student discipline, their neighborhoods that had the most problems with gangs, their insertion into former white enclaves that gave rise to social unrest. Just as their culture was a resource for liberation, their very existence was a catalyst for social upheavals and racial tensions. (3) Rock & Riot. If the release of the presocial (or at least preMcCarthy), primitive, and negroid id was an indirect affinity that rock & roll had with juvenile delinquency, white America worried even more about what seemed to be direct and blatant connections between rock & roll and teenage savagery. According to Frank Sinatra, Rock 'n' roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons[,] and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty lyrics ... it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth. l ? While Sinatra's pronouncement here may strike us, as does so much other "respectable" opinion of the time, as the sign of an ideologically overdetermined frenzy much more dangerous than the phenomenon that inspired it could actually be, his opinion is quite unexceptionable viewed in the light of the 1950S press. According to that press, rock & roll was a fad like most other fads except more dangerous, steeped as it was in the violent energies of the Negro, the poor white, the delinquent, and the hoodlum, all of whom found, in the spaces defined by the music, room for the free play of desires and drives that were antagonistic to those of civilized society, and that could spill over to affect (or afflict) otherwise "good" teenagers, if it were allowed to develop unchecked.

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For starters, the culture of rock & roll consisted of a rich iconography of delinquency. The styles we associate with it-leather jackets, blue jeans, the "ducktail" haircut, the preference for the motorcycle -were all associated in the consciousness of the 1950S with rebellious, discontented, working-class teenagers who were always "at risk" for delinquency. In the words of some in attendance at the National Association of Secondary School Principals: "You can't put a kid into a monkey suit like one of these blue jeans outfits and expect him to make any kind of good record for himself." 18 These associations were solidified by such movies as The Wild One and Rebel without a Cause, which suggested to parents and other emissaries of power that this manifestation of working-class youth culture denied the validity of those long-term life projects-the" American Dream"-that so many of the other battles of the period tried to affirm. Rock & roll culture was a culture of the immediate, of physical pleasures affirmed as ends-in-themselves, all of which evoked a dangerous denial of interest in long-term consequences and responsibilities, and a death of ambition that could only be an ominous sign in a scruffy prole teenager. And it was even more worrisome that rock & roll offered a system of objects and roles that were both attractive and accessible to middle-class youth. The nascence of rock & roll indeed appeared to offer not only a theory and iconography of delinquency and teenage rebellion, but its practice and fruition as well. The early accounts of the new music in newspapers and journals are all descriptions of a struggle, if not a riot. According to the New York Times account of one Freed show in New York, thousands upon thousands of teenagers lined up on Washington's Birthday (a school holiday) for hours to see the show, in the process smashing windows, crashing barricades, and destroying the ticket seller's box at the theater where the show was held. All of this was the doing, according to the headline, of the "blue-jean and leather-jacket set," a headline that supplied for the parents the sartorial codes that defined the meaning of the music. (In case the connection wasn't obvious enough, the story ran on a page alongside stories of slain young robbers, exhortations to establish dress codes, and a host of denunciations of the music.) 19

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Indeed, in the mainstream press of the day, all signs indicated that rock & roll and violence were directly and irredeemably linked. One rock & roll riot at Fort Bragg was cut short with tear gas; in Cambridge, a rock & roll fundraising event at MIT turned into a fracas after it became evident that there would be no dancing allowed. The culprits were "these kids ... that you knew weren't from any college." 20 Riots in Asbury Park, San Jose, Dallas, and Boston destroyed property and sent some people to the hospital; and after the riot in Boston (which, as Martin and Segrave argue, was as likely a police riot as anything else), Alan Freed was indicted for "inciting the unlawful destruction of property." 21 Apparently, after a night of exceptionally tight crowd control by the police, the teenage audience at Freed's show in Boston got out of their seats and rushed into the aisles to dance, at which point the head of security ordered the lights turned on. Freed allegedly told the audience: "I guess the police here in Boston don't want you kids to have a good time," which set off a riot. Worse, people were mugged, robbed, and stabbed outside the arena (which was in a high-crime area) before, during, and after the show, which for many confirmed the connection between crime, violence, and rock & roll. But the problems with violence at rock & roll shows were not so much attributable to the music as to the fact that these shows were large gatherings at which a whole host of class conflicts played themselves out. Early rock & roll shows were interracial affairs; AfricanAmericans made up between one- and two-thirds of the audience, which also contained white working-class kids who found the more "hillbilly" aspect of the music appealing. This was a highly volatile concatenation of class and race antagonisms that neither the music nor the police could easily contain, and the sexually charged atmosphere of these shows and record hops provided the spark that could set off conflagrations at almost any time. We could argue that, just as these shows provided arenas in which repressed hostilities could return to the psychosocial surface, the incidence of these explosions provided rare occasions in which hostilities could be discussed, albeit in a highly mediated fashion. Moreover, it should not surprise us that the music was held accountable for these explosions of hostility.

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They were symptoms of a disease that was too shameful, too fraught with consequences, to be discussed in the light of day, and as a result the only therapy allowed was to make the symptoms disappear.

These attempts to come to grips with the nature and menace of rock & roll are all from the perspective of power, from the point of view, that is, of people and groups who saw the new music as a threat to the hierarchies and hegemonies that ensured their continued social domination. We can see this as the ideological flip side of rock & roll's liberating potential. The rise of rock & roll and the other youthoriented forms of popular culture was, in the broadest sense, a critique and renunciation of what Herbert Marcuse called affirmative culture. It restored culture to the realm of use-value, tied it back in to a complex of other activities (dancing foremost among them), removed culture from its traditional function as an affirmation of the life of the exalted spirit over and against the life of the body that has been defined and constricted by the imperatives of capitalist production. That is what it might have seemed to the mobs of bopping kids. But to their parents-especially if these parents were scared, conservative, cautious middle-class parents-the music was a threat. During the early development of rock & roll, nobody seemed to crystallize this new threat, this new avatar of the enemy within, better than Elvis Presley did. The career of Elvis in the 1950S turns out to be exemplary not only for the sort of social forces that he inspired and signified, but also as a catalyst and focus for the wrath of power in the face of the noise. While Elvis would define the parameters of style and desire for teenagers by the end of the 1950S, at the time of his first recordings (1953-54), he attired himself in the sartorial code of the delinquent or the "cat," as stylish, tough young men called themselves in Memphis. From the beginning, Elvis occupied a space of class and race anxiety that would define his image and his music; the son of poor white trash, he carried himself, on Sam Phillips's account, with a degree and kind of uncertainty associated with Memphis blacks: " ... [H]e felt so inferior. He reminded me of a black man in that way. His insecurity was so markedly like that of a black person." His first record bore the trace of this same ambiva-

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lence: the a-side was a cover of "That's All Right," a song by the blues singer Arthur Crudup, while the b-side was a cover of Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky." 22 All of Presley's recordings with Sun Records did quite well, even though they were on an independent label and therefore did not have either the distribution or the ideological clout of a major-label endorsement behind them. In spite of this success, newspapers and magazines did not see fit to speak of Presley or the menace he represented until he did receive this clout, in December of 1955, from RCA Records, which was so desperate to get into the rock & roll market and get Presley's services that they bought out his contract for the staggering sum of$45,000. It was at that point that the threat of Elvis, as the poor white messenger of poor black sexuality, became a material force, a kind of virus that had to be reckoned with by any means necessary. At first, he seemed to be merely the grotesque punchline to a cultural joke that people were taking too seriously. The 30 April 1956 issue of Life called him" A Howling Hillbilly Success" and suggested that his music was a travesty of the traditional male role; his music had "a sob around every note." But as his popularity increased and his appearances multiplied, the opposition stiffened. Life claimed in an issue later that year that Presley was "A Different Kind of Idol," one who set potentially dangerous precedents, who legitimated both the personal style and sexual expressiveness of delinquents (or of blacks), whose career was pushing the boundaries of American acceptability perhaps farther than it should be allowed to gO.23 Elvis was culturally and politically dangerous not only because of his particular reconsolidation of the codes of class and race, but of gender as well. Perhaps the most common complaint in the demonography of Elvis is that he was a marginally literate pedagogue whose chief lesson was sexual confusion. The writer for Life and Jack Gould of the New York Times both agreed that Elvis's signature stage mannerism-his wild, grinding, abandoned hip movements-were not so much suggestive of a new masculine sexuality as they were reminders of the old spectacular presentations of female sex: the burlesque, the bump-and-grind, the hoochy-koochy. And, Gould implied, that was the only reason (or excuse) for his fame. 24 Gould's assessment seemed to be borne out by the famous broadcast of Elvis's first ap-

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pearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. The network censors would allow only the upper part of his body to be broadcast, although the studio audience could see him as a gyrating totality. This carefully censored broadcast of Elvis is perhaps the best figure for the attitude of power toward the rock & roll of the 1950S. Elvis there became a bivalent text, exoteric and esoteric at the same time: while the surface Elvis, his "front," if you will, was not terribly frightening or exceptionable, this front was supported by a "secret" Elvis, darkly sexual, capable of generating an outbreak of mass hysteria that all could see at home, leaving its cause to the imagination. But even this bit of social prophylaxis was too suggestive. The networks were roundly condemned later for "exploiting" teenagers: "On the Sullivan program he injected movements of the tongue and indulged in wordless singing that were singularly distasteful." 25 The fault here did not lie with Presley, who was presumed to be too stupid to chart the course of his fate (he was, after all, just doing what came naturally), nor with the teenagers, who were simply poor dupes, but with the sober, responsible men of the ruling class who were in a position to decide what would and would not be represented in the legitimate and legitimating cultural markets of the day. Elvis was a "blue note" that did not belong in respectable music or in respectable society, a dissonance that was too appealing and suggestive of a new form of musical and social equilibrium radically at odds with the prevailing one of the day. The reaction to Elvis was severe, at all levels of society: police departments sent out vice squads to his concerts; religious organizations held prayer rallies to counterpose his pernicious influence; America (the magazine) warned America (the nation) to "Beware Elvis Presley," calling on TV stations and talent agencies to cease "handling such nauseating stuff." 26 There seemed to be no way for the culture to contain or control the menace that was Elvis; he was, in the words of a writer at Newsweek, an "inextinguishable" flame that threatened to set American society burning, despite the best intentions and efforts of critics. When things seemed darkest, however, the army came to the rescue: Elvis was drafted. The political implication of his induction is still widely discussed. The draft board in Memphis seemed quite delighted at the prospect of causing this white-trash boy a little trouble; Dave Marsh

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has argued that this was a deliberate move on the part of the government to teach Elvis a lesson: "The government's intention in drafting Elvis was to rob him of everything-not just fame but also his wealth and whatever new dignity he had acquired." 27 I am in no position to evaluate Marsh's argument, although it seems to me that it smacks too much of a conspiracy theory of power that sees its action and its agency being transacted at all times behind closed doors, with its members (the people with the ability to make decisions that shape and transform other people's lives) operating in perfect consensus, in perfect secrecy, and with perfect efficacy. Whatever the merits of that theory, in this particular case it overlooks the fact that the actual effect of Elvis's tenure in the army was not to silence him, but to reclaim him for the benefit of a constellation of political and economic forces to which he at first seemed iconographically antipathetic. Before, he represented all that was threatening in American youth culture; he scrambled the codes of sexuality, class, and race in a manner that suggested dangerous new linkages and reconciliations among them. His stint in the army enabled him to "clean up his act"; it was the perfect way to make him safe for democracy. His manager, Col. Tom Parker, insisted that he take no special privileges, and that no concessions be made for him; he entered as a normal soldier, as a "grunt," and when he emerged, he had been purified of his socio-semiological sins. As though to demonstrate that newfound purity, his first performance-televised, of course-after his (honorable) discharge was with Frank Sinatra. Elvis was a sideburned delinquent no more. During the 1950S, it was quite rare for censors to attack specific individuals, except insofar as they were readily available, culturally strategic targets; perhaps the only other incidents of the full weight of power brought down on an individual rock & roller were Chuck Berry's conviction on a Mann Act charge of transporting 'a minor across state lines for the purpose of committing an impropriety, and the arrest of Alan Freed and some others on charges of commercial bribery following the payola hearings. Such confrontations always gave the target of censorship access to too many means of institutionalized resistance. In general, the censors did not fare so well when they relied on direct confrontation with the enemy within. Several

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cities and communities across the country tried to ban rock & roll shows: Jersey City, Asbury Park, Boston, Cambridge, Los Angeles, San Jose, Newport. Yet the futility (and in some cases the illegality) of this project must have been apparent. At best, proscribing public concerts could only affirm the sense many young people had that rock & roll was their music, that there was indeed something special about it, and that the authorities were merely acting out of terror and a rage to order out of proportion to the chaos that was threatened. Even if shows were banned, this would at any rate interdict only one leg of what was rock & roll's nuclear triad of delivery systems. Rock & roll concerts were spectacles at which the tensions that comprised social life in the American 1950S were displayed and resolved, true, but they were not nearly as omnipresent nor as insidious as the music's other two delivery systems: records and radio. Due to the "bad taste" of the American public, as well as the irresponsibility of those in positions of power in the music industry, containing rock & roll at that level would require a much more concerted effort that would specify it as a disease, isolate and expose its causes (or its agents), and destroy its capacity to replicate and transmit itself both economically and culturally. The form that therapy took was two series of hearings held in the late 1950S. The first, in 1958, was held in the name of investigating a possible conflict of interest in the radio industry. There were two large, competing organizations that managed the lucrative publishing rights to recorded music: the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), and Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI). ASCAP had held a virtual monopoly until the 1940S in the field of music licensing, which was the mechanism by which publishers collected royalties on songs they owned. Like any good monopoly, they used their position to maximize their profits, setting royalty fees at figures that seemed exorbitant to broadcasters and other firms that used licensed music. These broadcasters and record companies therefore formed BMI in the 1940S in an effort to break ASCAP's monopoly. ASCAP was not only a music licensing company, however, but also a critical gatekeeper in the music business, one that carefully selected which publishers they would represent and that paid royalties based on the depth of a songwriter's catalog and seniority within the com-

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pany. Neither of these practices worked to the benefit of "race," "hillbilly," or (later) rock & roll songwriters, whose publishers were routinely denied access to ASCAP's near-essential services. Naturally, then, these publishers and songwriters flocked to BM!. When these previously marginal musics assumed places of economic and cultural centrality in the 1950S, BMI profited enormously. The problem with this success was that BMI was a nonprofit organization owned by several of the major players in the broadcast industry: many large radio stations and record companies were BMI affiliates. The stage was set, then, for the hearings, which were at one level an inquiry into possible conflicts of interest on the part of businesses (such as radio stations) that held public licenses; on another level, they were an inquisition into the guilt or innocence of rock & roll. But perhaps I should not say "levels" here, which implies that the two projects are in some way separate. In the hearings they were both aspects of a seamless totality in which the survival of the music was expressly at stake. The popularity of rock & roll was held to be a direct function of merchandising; according to such an unbiased expert as Oscar Hammerstein, rock & roll songs "die as soon as the plug stops." 28 Ephemeral and culturally degraded, rock & roll's dissemination was wrecking America's capacity to appreciate good music, which was defined not just as music in the high European art tradition, but also as the "ageless treasures" of the American popular song (which ASCAP licensed, for a fee): the compositions of Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and, yes, Oscar Hammerstein. The reason this worthy music did not even have the chance to fallon deaf ears was that disc jockeys, with only avarice in their hearts, weren't giving it a chance to be heard and appreciated. Vance Packard suggested to the committee that it was the disc jockeys, those master manipulators, the hidden persuaders, who were corrupting America's children by operating as advance men for broadcasters, who held a multifaceted interest in rock & roll. They owned the licensing agency that paid out royalties for the music. Moreover, rock & roll was "cheap." Not just cheap in the cultural sense; that much was obvious. But it was economically cheap as well. Mr. Packard pointed out that recording rock & roll did not require the use of expensive, union-scale studio musicians or orchestras, did not re-

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quire the services of expensive, legitimate songwriters, and did not demand the use of trained singers with expensive fees. Not only were those things not necessary, they were positively useless in that musical context. The outcome of this new musical economy of scale? Our airways have been flooded in recent years with whining guitarists, musical riots put to a switchblade beat, obscene lyrics about hugging, squeezing, and rocking all night long. This is the diet served up daily to young Americans whose tastes are still forming. 29 In these hearings, or at least in the testimony of the witnesses who favored legislation, "BMI" became a complicated signifier for not just rock & roll but the entire apparatus by means of which it is produced and disseminated. For it is by means of that total apparatus that American minds were being rotted out by the menacing noise of rock, race, and hillbilly music, all of which were considered similarly cheap and worthless. Indeed, the senators at that hearing repeatedly stated that they were not really interested in what was the nominal subject of the hearing, the squabble between those two economic giants, ASCAP and BM!. The senators wanted to argue about that great aesthetic question that had such dire political consequences: what to do with rock & roll. In the words of Senator John Pastore from Rhode Island: "What difference does it make who is doing the poisoning? Does it not become the responsibility of the Congress to remove the cause and the source?" 30 "The cause and the source" was BMI, the poison was rock & roll and its related musics, and the witnesses were quite concerned to point out that these conspirators were not only culturally inferior and economically suspect, but were, quite frankly, un-American: In short, a shrewd newcomer to this country came to BMI and pointed out a neglected lode of cheaply mined music. BMI set him up in the business of exploiting this long-scorned vein, and almost overnight the sound of the "heartbeat of America" came wailing and stomping over the airways, from thousands of radio stations. 31 This particular definition of "un-American" is quite expansionistic, well able to encompass all sorts of difference from the norm estab-

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61

Iished by and in reference to white middle-class professionals such as Mr. Packard himself. The music was deeply suspect because it came from people who had no warrant or right to promote their culture as being the spontaneous song of the American Adam: Negroes, Latin Americans, "a milk-truck driver, a pair of teenage schoolgirls, a publicity man," not to mention Elvis Presley, who was a critical agent in the "heavy infiltra[tion]" of the popular song charts by music that had the bad taste to be popular. Mr. Packard's testimony was extreme, a brittle ideological crystallization of an attitude shared by most of the witnesses at the hearing who were critical of rock & roll. The music was always cheap, always the product of inferior songwriters, and its popularity (which was held to be the exclusive work of a broadcasting industry that was utterly effective at forcing its wishes on the American public) was won at the direct cost to the work of the "trained, willing, able, and accomplished" who, by virtue of their membership in ASCAP, were demonstrably of cultural value. If Packard and his colleagues focused the issue of the hearing, they also polarized it in such a way that there was nothing the committee could have done about stopping the menace. The position, as stated, was too easy to object to for all the best reasons. Senator Albert Gore, Sr., of Tennessee came by after Packard's testimony to denounce his "gratuitous insult to thousands of our fellow Tennesseans, both in and out of the field of country music." 32 More important, if in the testimony of the critics "BMI" became q coded expression for the cultural depravity that rock & roll represented, "ASCAP" became, all too easily and all too legitimately, a coded expression for cultural elitism. Numerous witnesses from all walks of life gave testimony before the committee of their personal experiences of exclusion from ASCAP: songwriters, publishers, milkmen, hil~billies, and the veteran schoolteacher from Jacksonville, Florida, who happened to be the composer of "Heartbreak Hotel." All of these people told similar stories: while, technically, membership in ASCAP was open to all, in practice the applications of those who did not fit into the company profile were never answered, their requests for information never recognized, and their songs never published, or if they were, the royalty structure favored songwriters who were old and established over all others. The disc jockeys laughed off the conspiracy

62

Trent Hill

model that the ASCAP witnesses relied on to explain the predominance of rock & roll on the radio. In the end, ASCAP's arguments were refuted and their image as cultural guarantors was rendered ambivalent: guarantors, yes, but of a remote, elite, exclusive culture, as concerned with keeping the helots out as with keeping the treasures in. Which were, after all, two aspects of the same project. Looking at that round of hearings, we could say, following Jacques Attali, that one of the threatening qualities of rock & roll was that it represented a revolution in the mode of production of "popular" music. It threatened an entire system of rigid hierarchies that dominated and defined all phases of musical production: the abyss between performer and audience, songwriter and performer, disc jockey and record publisher, as well as the hierarchies that existed within each of those fields, such as that between "independent" record labels and "major" labels. Along with opening up the production of music to would-be musicians, rock & roll opened up the production and distribution of records to would-be entrepreneurs. Anybody with some capital (not a lot, necessarily-some would do quite well) could put out a record, and small record labels could successfully compete with big labels.:B But this democratization of production had a profoundly ambiguous political meaning. As democratization-as a demonstration of the possibilities of socioeconomic fluidity and mobility in America-it was something to be valued and praised, which is exactly what happened during the 1958 BMI-ASCAP hearings. But as a vector of cultural, libidinal, and political chaos and rebellion, as an agent for the confusion of the values, mores, and assumptions of power that guaranteed the" American way of life" as it stood in the late 1950S, it was a force to be reckoned with in the only way that power in the 1950S could reckon with any kind of dissent: by stifling it. The method of stifling it was not the old way, the way of Anthony Comstock and his Society for the Suppression of Vice, which would have required that some spokesman for good American taste drag each of the offending records-all thousand or so of them a year, recorded and distributed by a whole host of geographically diffuse labels-into a court of law, and establish the guilt of each individual record. That was not the way that power in 1950S America worked,

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63

or needed to work. What was needed was the production of the spectacle of consensus, some compelling proof that the whole business of rock & roll was corrupt and in need of surveillance, containment, and strict regulation. This was precisely the function of the second round of hearings aimed at establishing the guilt of rock & roll as a totality: the payola hearings of 1960. The hearings were held concurrently with a series of hearings aimed at uncovering corruption in TV game shows, and were aimed at similar breaches of ideological faith: whereas the TV hearings investigated charges that game shows were rigged, the payola hearings sought to establish that radio programming was "on the fix." The investigators (which included the FCC, the FTC, and a House subcommittee) were on rather more substantial legal ground than the ASCAP/BMI committee had been; while payola was not a federal crime at the time that the hearings began, it was a crime in several states, and the consensus in the news organs (as well as on the floor of the committee room) was that the representatives were investigating a system of criminal conspiracy rather than holding an inquiry into aesthetics. But these two apparently unrelated projects wove in and out of the hearings as their necessary and sufficient motifs. The targets of the hearings were not songwriters, but rather the men (and they were mostly men) who were responsible for record production, marketing, and dissemination. These were the people who were ultimately to blame for the music's existence and reproduction in a commodity economy, and who were therefore a much more efficient target for regulatory zeal. They included many of the "big fish" of the industry: presidents of major distribution companies, record company CEOs, and some of the most important disc jockeys in the country, including Alan Freed and Dick Clark. Held ostensibly to investigate whether or not rock & roll disc jockeys had accepted money in exchange for playing records on their radio shows, the hearings were a grand social theater of the confessional, a spectacular confirmation of the presence of the enemy within and a means by which this enemy could be anatomized and purged. Disc jockeys were called before the assembled representatives and asked to confess their sins, which began with playing rock & roll in the first place, and only ended with the taking of money. One

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of the first witnesses to testify, OJ Norm Prescott from Boston, was formerly known best for having held a write-in contest for a lock of Elvis's hair at his radio station, a promotion that earned him a place in Life magazine. In front of the committee, however, he expressed regret for having played the music; he had done so, he said, chiefly from economic necessity. According to him, payola was rampant in the business, and was "the backbone of the radio station."34 Prescott (and many of the penitent disc jockeys who followed him) confirmed the suspicions many responsible Americans had about rock & roll: that the claims that it was genuinely popular were a sham, that the ratings for popular records were based on whim and nonsense (or payola), and, in general, that the music, which was by and large brazen, ludicrous, and rather degraded, would not have a ghost of a chance unless it was sustained by a conspiracy of bribery and fraud: MR. BENNETT:

MR. PRESCOTT: MR. BENNETT: MR. PRESCOTT:

Well, do you think without payola that a lot of this so-called junk music, rock 'n' roll stuff, which appeals to the teenagers would not be played, or do you think that kind of thing would be played anyway regardless of the payola? Never get on the air. Do you think payola is responsible for it? Yes; it keeps it on the air, because it fills pockets. 3s

Witness after witness testified that rock & roll was the sound of payola. In the words of Alan Dary, another Boston-area disc jockey: "I do my level best to play the type of music that an adult audience would enjoy. Consequently, I do not get into the raucous kind of sound that I had always associated payola with." 36 The collusion between the disc jockeys and the promotion men was nothing less than a ruthlessly effective "thought control operation," according to the committee. Record producers and distributors would cut deals and make payoffs to disc jockeys (to give special consideration to a label's records) and to record stores (to report high sales of a company's records to trade journals and sales-tracking agencies); this would lead, by the iron logic of mass brainwashing, to teenagers buying the records in question, which would in theory lead to more payola, more sales, and more money for all concerned. Except, of

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course, for the poor duped public, which was doubly deprived: of its money, which was bad, but also of its right to hear good music, adult music, on the radio, which was worse. The unspoken conviction throughout these hearings is that the success of rock & roll represented a local abdication of market forces in favor of a pure conspiracy. The committee was convinced that it was only through payola that a music so self-evidently inferior could become so popular, and their interpretation developed the force of truth as the hearings progressed: rock & roll was at once a cause and a symptom of a cultural scandal; it was the function of an insidious conspiracy aimed at those too intellectually and morally weak to avoid its clutches, a conspiracy that worked without opposition at the level of either the individual conscience or social responsibility. And the work of the committee was therefore twofold: to establish the moral guilt of both the industry and the music. Indeed, it is hard to read the massive transcript of the payola hearings without being reminded time and again of the spectacle of confession that McCarthy and his acolytes had made a part of the political and cultural landscape of the 1950S. The committee sought to rid society of a dangerous menace that lurked within its legitimate channels: the morally corrupt disc jockey who was responsible for ruining American teenagers; the record company that released the raucous stuff in the first place, and then bribed the disc jockeys to play it; and the distribution companies that functioned as the nervous system by which the entire productive network communicated with itself and with the outside world. The point was, ultimately, this enemy's exposure. Since payola was legal, nothing could be done directly against the disc jockeys who had accepted it, nor against the record labels and distributors who had offered it in the first place. But, as was so often the case, the direct punishment of the "guilty" by the full mechanism of the law was not necessary. In the committee's mind, the subterranean practice of payola was linked with all of the multiform evils of rock & roll music, its popularity and its proliferation. And the committee was convinced that the exposure of this corruption, and the ensuing national consensus on its threat, would work to purge the country of its cultural menace.

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As it turned out, the project succeeded in its aims. Many of the disc jockeys who appeared before the committee lost their jobs, and others throughout the country had to forfeit their positions in order to satisfy the consensus of power that, finally, something had to be done, and could be done. Alan Freed, "the Pied Piper of rock & roll," was unrepentant before the committee, and was arrested along with several others and charged with violating New York's commercial bribery laws. Defending himself against these charges broke him both financially and physically, and he was never again to play a majcl role in the development of the music he had in many ways pioneered. Indeed, such was the power of the hearings as a theater of guilt that they succeeded in their cultural goal-the general containment of rock & roll-even when they failed to expose the culpability of a particular witness. This is perhaps clearest in the case of Dick Clark, who was one of the main targets of the investigation. Clark's national TV show American Bandstand was a powerful force for the transmission of both the sound and the culture of rock & roll. Every day after school, American teenagers could see people just like them trying out the latest dances to the newest songs, and Clark was their interpreter. In addition, he had extensive financial investments in the business: in a variety of publishing houses, independent record labels, distributors, and a record-pressing plant. Therefore, not only was Clark a most important vector by which the music was transmitted, he was also emblematic of the nefarious connection between money interests and rock & roll that supposedly enabled the music to get off the ground in the first place and establish its hegemony. It stood to reason that he would be the most guilty of payola. A great deal was at stake in his testimony, and both he and the committee prepared extensively for his appearance. Clark retained the services of Computech, a statistical-analysis service, to demonstrate that he did, indeed, play records according to their popularity, and not according to the degree of his financial stake in them; the committee employed the services of government statisticians to criticize the methodology used by Computech and to refute its analysis. Both the committee and Clark prepared a descriptive catalog of his investments. There is a critically fascinating difference between his affidavit (which did not appear in the hearings transcript) and the

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67

presentation of the committee (which did). Clark's affidavit is a narrative of the history of his involvement in these companies; the committee chose to present the information in the form of several large charts which show the music industry as a large, synchronic web at the center of which was Dick Clark. Clark's defense, which succeeded in saving his career, would hold substantial consequences for the future development of the music. He argued for a narrow definition of payola that demonstrated to the satisfaction of the committee-as-court-of-Iaw (if not to the satisfaction of the committee-as-confessor) that while he regarded the work of the committee as helpful to the industry, he did not think that he had taken part in any practices he regarded as immoral or illegal. And this argument was mutually supportive of his representation of himself as a middle-class Everyman who just happened to get involved with rock & roll because he liked teenagers and thought the music was a solid business opportunity. He claimed that he had invested so broadly in the business as a means of providing for himself and his family in the event his TV and radio career came to an end. He worried about his reputation. He was, in short, capable of defending himself and the music as a legitimate, sober, American business enterprise that would be quite willing to work within the constraints set for it by the legal and aesthetic guardians of American culture. And Clark was not alone. Networks and radio stations established conflict-of-interest policies that would protect them from suspicion, although it limited the degree to which people could involve themselves in the music and its production. (Clark, for instance, would have to sell practically all of his holdings at a substantial loss. ) As if it were necessary after the hearings, practically all major record companies signed consent decrees to stop offering any financial consideration for the playing of its records. The investigation even touched the investigators themselves; when it became public knowledge that FCC Chairman John Doerfer had accepted a plane and yacht trip from a broadcasting company official (with whom he happened to be friends), he had to resign his position. The effects of the payola hearings on rock & roll would be many and manifold. Economically, the hearings worked to force a consolidation of power and hierarchy in the music business; conflicts of

68

Trent Hill

interest that had resulted from the limited number of qualified people performing a variety of institutional and economic functions disappeared by force. The hearings worked, as it were, to bring the music industry from the age of liberal/competitive capitalism into the age of monopoly capitalism. As a result, it became harder and harder for small labels to compete for talent; indeed, by the mid-1960s, they would no longer be factors in the marketplace. Payola had been a force that increased competition in the record business; without payola the small record labels lost the means by which they could compensate for the major labels' promotional weight. Not coincidentally, the small labels were responsible for much of the music in the first place. The hearings also affected the direction of rock & roll as a "pure" cultural form (it' we can allow ourselves, for a moment, to imagine what such a thing might be). They sent a powerful message to the keepers of the cultural gates-the presidents, A&R men (talent scouts), and managers of record labels and distribution firms-that it was no longer safe or really even acceptable to squander these valuable material resources on the manufacture and dissemination of such cheap and "raucous" music. At least they sent a word to the wise, to the men and women who had survived the scandal with their positions intact; after all, the hearings drove many of the most knowledgeable and committed people out of the profession. They would be replaced by more sedate and cautious people who would use their power responsibly; while Chuck Berry, Negro and cradle robber, was in prison, America could have good, talented singers such as Pat Boone, who used to drive his Corvette to Columbia (where he studied" Art for Art's sake" while looking dreamily into the future), and who wrote inspirational books for confused adolescents in between interpreting and selling songs written by Negroes and white trash. 37 The result of the hearings, then, was a containment of the menace far more effective than the mere silencing of it could ever have been. Rock & roll was a powerful, contrary voice in 1950S American cultural discourse, a voice that bore with it disquieting news not only of the existence of others, but of the possibility of Otherness, of a different configuration of both personal and social energies. The achievement of the hearings was to recuperate and co-opt that voice

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69

to make it not only safe for the tender ears of the children of power but an effective soundtrack for its collective reveries of stability.

Notes Hearinas before the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, United States Senate, Ninety-Ninth Conaress, First Session, on Contents of Music and the Lyrics of Records (Washington, 1985), 61. 2 In a sense, I am recasting Michel Foucault's argument against adopting the repressive hypothesis at the level of repressive state apparatuses: even at that level, the tendency of those in power is to avoid direct and spectacular confrontation and antagonisms in favor of using more diffuse methods for controlling discourse and practice. 3 Of course, it is possible to use both strategies to devastating effect. Retailers are much more susceptible to legal pressure than are record labels, who can better afford the legal defenses necessary to prosecute and win a censorship case. The flip side of this is that if a producer-be it a record label or a book publisher-is willing and able to fund defenses for accused retailers, the case against these retailers will fall as the case against the artifact falls. But if the censor's legal strategy fails, the political and economic effect of these cases all too often works in his favor: by drawing attention to the retailer's dubious wares, the censor manages to subject him or her to the community's wrath. 4 I do not mean to say here that these groups escaped repression; after all, it was their unions that were observed and infiltrated, their organizations that were suspected of harboring closet Reds and functioning as their fronts. Moreover, it was their children who were the iconic embodiments of the perils of delinquency. But within the elite cultural milieus that decided who and what would be censored, that examined the culture of the proles and found it perilously inadequate to the task of raising children who could "fit/' it was commonly assumed that these proles were incapable of real agency; they were not masters of their destiny, but raw material to be mastered either by forces of American capitalism or The Enemy. Many of the episodes of censorship in the 19S0S would be carried out in the name of their protection; others, in the name of their containment; but none in the name of their suppression. The targets of these episodes were always members of the same cultural and political elites to which the censors belonged themselves. So long as the prole remained at his level-so long as he did not seek any position of power or responsibility from which he could challenge the order of things-he was considered beyond suspicion. Or, perhaps I should say, beneath suspicion. 5 Freed was a college-educated classical music disc jockey at a radio station in Cleveland who was tipped oft by a friend in the know, that white kids were venturing into black neighborhoods in droves to buy records cut by black r&b artists. He began playing these records on his late-night radio show, which rapidly became

70

6

7 8 9 10 1I 12 13

14

15

Trent Hill

the most popular one in Cleveland. Freed invested a great deal of showmanship in broadcasting the music; while a record was playing on the air, he would pound on a telephone book that he kept by the mike, sing, moan, and howl along with the music. William (Bill) Gaines, Jr., won fame and notoriety during the early 1950S as the publisher of EC Comics, a line noted for its crime, horror, and science-fiction titles, Tales from the Crypt among them. These books were condemned by a variety of "experts," critics, and social commentators (chief among them Dr. Fredric Wertham, author of Seduction of the Innocent) as being responsible for the enormous rise in juvenile delinquency during the period. These comics (and Gaines) were the subject of several days' worth of Senate hearings in 1954 whose result was the passage of the Comics Code of 1954. Ed Ward, "The Fifties and Before," in Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes, and Ken Tucker, Rock of A8es: The Rollin8 Stone History of Rock & Roll (New York, 1986), 77. I do not want to layout the early history of rock & roll in extensive detail here, if only because there are so many excellent works that do the job better than I could ever hope to. Besides Rock of A8es, Charlie Gillette's The Sound of the City is perhaps the classic text. For a brief, concise, and specific introduction, see American Popular Music: Readin8s from the Popular Press, Volume II: The A8e of Rock, ed. Timothy E. Scheurer (Bowling Green, 1989). Greil Marcus's "Presliad" (in Mystery Train: Ima8es of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music [New York, 1975]) is the seminal article in the field of Presley studies. Gertrude Samuels, "Why They Rock 'n' Roll-And Should They?" New York Times Ma8azine, 12 January 1958, 16. Edith Evans Asbury, "Rock 'n' Roll Teen-Agers Tie Up the Times Square Area," New York Times, 23 February 1956. Milton Bracker, "Experts Propose Study of 'Craze,''' New York Times, 23 February 1956. Allan Bloom, The Closin8 of the American Mind: How Hi8her Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York, 1987), 73. New York Times, 26 October 1956. Variety, 23 February 1955, 2. I am indebted here, as in many other places in this article, to the work of Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave, whose Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock 'n' Roll (Hamden, Conn., 1988) is an impressively researched, comprehensive chronicle of both criticisms of rock & roll and efforts at censoring it. It is an excellent introduction to the problem of censorship in the music, as well as a good factual account of the general history of the music, which has since the 1960s tended to define itself in opposition to the efforts made to control and contain it. Norman Mailer, The White Ne8ro (San Francisco, 1957), 4- While Mailer is here directly discussing jazz music, this music was itself losing its appeal among AfricanAmericans, who were turning more and more to r&b and other dance musics to gratify the "obligatory pleasures of the body." New York Times, I December 1955.

The Enemy Within

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33

34

35 36 37

71

"Segregationist Wants Ban on 'Rock 'n' Roll,' " New York Times, 30 May 1956; and "Who the Hoodlums Are," Newsweek, 23 April 1956. Samuels, "Why They Rock 'n' Roll," 19. "Principals Toss a Rock at Presley-Mimic Role," New York Times, 25 February 1957. Asbury, "Rock 'n' Roll Teen-agers." Laura Haddock, "Cambridge Acts after Teen Riot," Christian Science Monitor, 12 March 1956. Martin and Segrave, Anti-Rock, 36. Ward, Stokes, and Tucker, Rock of A8es, 79-80. "Elvis-a Different Kind of IdoL" Life, 27 August 1956. Jack Gould, "TV: New Phenomenon," New York Times, 6 June 1956. Jack Gould, "Elvis Presley: Lack of Responsibility Is Shown by TV in Exploiting Teen-Agers," New York Times, 16 September 1956. "Beware Elvis Presley," America, 23 June 1956, 294-95. Cited in Ward, Stokes, and Tucker, Rock of A8es, 162-63. Hearin8s before the Subcommittee on Communications of the Committee on Interstate and Forei8n Commerce, United States Senate, Ei8hty-Fifth Con8ress, Second Session, on S. 2834 (Washington, 1958), 6. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 141. In fact, during the early days of rock & roll, major labels were extremely reluctant to invest anything in something that was so obviously a "fad," so small labels did quite nicely, and indeed dominated the singles charts up until the middle 1960s. Hearin8s before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House of Representatives, Ei8hty-Sixth Congress, Second Session, on Payola and Other Deceptive Practices in the Broadcastin8 Field (Washington, 1960). Ibid., 39· Ibid., 92. Pat Boone's fullest statement as a social philosopher and counselor of youth can be found in his work, 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1958), which is a rather skillful translation of the Protestant work ethic into a series of analyses and prescriptions applicable to the American teenager in the late 1950S. It is full of helpful hints on "how to find your personal gold mine, how to work it, and what to do after it starts to pay," whether that mine be sexual or economic in nature.

Greil Marcus

A Corpse in Your Mouth: Adventures of a Metaphor, or Modern Cannibalism

People who talk about revolution and class struaale without referrina explicitly to everyday life, without understandina what is subversive about love and positive in the refusal of constraint, have corpses in their mouths. -Raoul Vaneigem, Paris, 1967

The slaughter increases, and [people] cling to the prestige of European glory. . . . [T]hey cannot persuade us to enjoy this rotting pile of human flesh they present to us. -Hugo Ball, Zurich, 1916

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Greif Marcus

Goering in his Hamburg address: 'Brass has always made an empire strong; butter and lard have at best made a people fat.' " -John Heartfield. Prague, 1935 "HURRAY, THE BUTTER IS GONE!

The only objective way of diagnosing the sickness of the healthy is by the incongruity between their rational existence and the possible course their lives might be given by reason. All the same, the traces of illness give them away: their skin seems covered by a rash printed in regular patterns, like a camouflage of the inorganic. The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for

A Corpse in Your Mouth

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prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. - Theodor Adorno, Los Angeles, 1944 In an era when art is dead [the student] remains the most loyal patron of the theatres and film clubs and the most avid consumer of its preserved corpse. -Association Federative Generale des Etudiants de Strasbourg/Internationale Situationniste, De La misere en milieu etudiant (On the Poverty of Student Life), Strasbourg, France, Fall 1966, as translated by the Situationist International in Ten Days That Shook the University: The Situationists at Strasbourg, London, early 1967 People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and positive in the refusal of constraint, have corpses in their mouths. -Raoul Vaneigem, Traite de savoir-vivre a l'usage des jeunes generations (Treatise on Living for the Young Generations), Paris, Fall 1967 People who talk about revolution and class struggle without.... -Wall poster, Comite Enrages-Internationale Situationniste, Paris, May 1968 PEOPLE WHO TALK ABOUT REVOLUTION AND CLASS STRUGGLE WITHOUT . . . .

-Anonymous graffiti, Paris, May 1968 ART IS DEAD-DON'T CONSUME ITS CORPSE

-Anonymous graffiti, Paris, May 1968 People who talk about revolution and class struggle without.... - Various unauthorized translations ofVaneigem's Treatise, published in pirate editions as The Revolution of Everyday Life, U.S.A. and U.K., late 1960s-early 1970S People who talk about revolution and class struggle without.... - Translation of Comite Enrages-Internationale Situationniste wall poster in Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International, edited by Christopher Gray, designed by Jamie Reid, U.K., 1974

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Greil Marcus

-Collage by Jamie Reid from Leaving the 20th Century

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77

It's like someone just told me there aren't going to be any more cheeseburgers in the world. -Felton Jarvis, record producer for Elvis Presley, on the occasion of Presley's death, U.S.A., August 1977

probe the sicker this bizarre

~it­

uation has turned out to be. It seems even mo~p ~~re and more sough t after 'Dt::"'l U"l:~~r oJ; "1.,;_ Horror. They are the only

ials', made :rom the remains of

two words to describe the latest

James Dean can 'be bought. Those

report f:rom our Pick of the Pose-

who have tasted this special-

~nock.

urs correspondent in

Ameri~a.

The

recently described sensational attempt to steal Elvis' doomed to reason

fai~ure

bein~a

it~~~

said they are rather tough

hut tasty. They are thoue~ to

body was

be authentic however, as they

from the start,

still contain bits of the car

succesful

has already bef?n stc,ged.

~natch

wreckage. 'Disneyburgers' are quite a diff-

Shock. Horror. They are the only two words to describe the latest report from our Pick of the Poseurs correspondent in America. The recently described sensational attempt to steal Elvis' body was doomed to failure from the start, reason being a successful snatch has already been staged. What's happened to the body? It now appears certain that it was minced down and turned into the most bizarre cult food of all time. Certainly "Presleyburgers" have been selling to the New York and West Coast rock aristocracy at up to $1000 a throw. Unconfirmed reports suggest that a small consignment of frozen Presleyburgers have arrived in U.K. and that Cliff Richard ate one just before going on at his recent Dome gig. P.O.T.P. reporters have questioned rock superstar Frankie Vaughn and though he declined to reply, his mouth was clearly seen to water. P.O.T.P. readers can draw their own conclusions.

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Greif Marcus

The further we went with our probe the sicker this bizarre situation has turned out to be. It seems even more rare and more sought after 'Death Burger Specials,' made from the remains of James Dean can be bought. Those who have tasted this specialty said they are rather tough but tasty. They are thought to be authentic however, as they still contain bits of the car wreckage. 'Disneyburgers' are quite a different matter however, as they had the good sense to deep freeze him only twenty minutes after he had died. Walt Disney will have quite a surprise however when they wake him up in the year 2,000 AD and finds a couple of his arms and legs missing. -Anonymous text (by Ray Holme and Joby Hooligan) in Pic of the Poseurs-Maaazine for Modern Youth, London, 1977

l!ATEUJrtJ dr-Back sleeve of Sex Pistols single "Satellite" (b-side of "Holidays in the Sun"), by Jamie Reid, London, Fall 1977

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-Sleeve of Cortinas single "Defiant Pose," by TC + P/Hipgnosis, London, 1978

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GreiJ Marcus

-Stickers enclosed with A Factory Sample. EP with recordings by Joy Division, the Durutti Column, John Dowie, and Cabaret Voltaire. Manchester. U.K .• 1978

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-Sleeve of "Mittageisen" ("Metal Postcard"). Siouxsie and the Banshees single ("pluck cogs from fob watches / for dinner on Friday"). London. 1979

82

Greif Marcus

-Sleeve of "C'mon Everybody," Sex Pistols single featuring the late Sid Vicious, by Jamie Reid, London, 1979

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-Rough design by Jamie Reid for sleeve of "Cmon Everybody." "The idea of the Vicious-Burger related back to the spoof we did as the Wicked Messengers. When Presley's body was lying in state at Graceland, there were loads of rumours about people trying to break in and steal it. We invented this little campaign-in a spoof fanzine called Pick of the Poseurs-saying that in fact his body had been stolen and had been turned into a commercial product-i.e., hamburgers. It also related to the old Situationist 'corpse' metaphor." -Jamie Reid, in Up They Rise-The Incomplete Works ofjamie Reid ... the King's decaying body is exhumed and brought back for one last concert tour (unfortunately, it keeps falling off its stool and collapsing onstage in a heap). The corpse is trotted out for record-store autographing sessions.... Finally, slices of flesh are hacked off and sold in "Piece 0' Presley" packages. -Rollin8 Stone, on John Myhre's film He May Be Dead, But He's Still Elvis, U.S.A., 1979

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OUR FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT WRITES:

Top show biz moguls and TV personalities were convicted last week of eating Viciousburgers at New York's prestigious Studio 54 Disco, after the latest of a series of Vice Squad raids on the "playground of the idle rich." Virgin Record Company boss, Richard Branson, 37, TV personality Dick Clark, 55, David Frost, 42, and several journalists, including Michael Watts, 38, editor of a music paper, were seen consuming several burgers each in what has been described as an "orgy of vampirism." "It was horrific," said clubgoer Richard DeNunzio of Brooklyn, "They each had several corpses in their mouths." More showbiz and media names, including some well-known News Reporters, are expected to be convicted as the hearings continue. The last few years have seen an increase in this bizarre cult of vampirism, of which the Viciousburger is only the latest example. Vampires are noteworthy for consuming star corpses in the form of burgers in the mistaken belief that some of the star's charisma will rub off on thern; sadly, as you can see, these attempts are doomed to failure and these cultists deluded. 'The cult is said to have begun in the 50'S with Deanburgers; these were very rare, and contained bits of Porsche wreckage and sunglasses-those cultists still alive who tasted them say "They were tough but tasty." Perhaps the worst outbreak of vampirism before the Viciousburger scandal was the Presleyburger scandal of 1977. The scandal was discovered when an attempt was made to steal Presley's body from the grave by occultists: the body was already stolen! It now appears that it was minced down and turned into the bizarre cult food, Presleyburgers. These are said to be very expensive ($1000 a throw) and high on fatty content, but it still didn't deter the thrill-seeking showbiz crowd: Mick Jagger was said to have eaten several before his recent Wembly concert. Heavy prison sentences imposed in Canada on Keith Richard, another vampire, stopped the spread of this disgusting cult, but with the present Viciousburger scandals it seems to be flourishing. And even now, there are unconfirmed reports of Curtisburgers, grisly burgers with hints of rope and marble. There is no truth, however, in the rumour

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Hitlerburgers are freely available: they were only available post-war and reserved for VIP's. -Anonymous text (by Jon Savage) found among the Jamie Reid Collection acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1979 ... there was even talk of having Elvis's corpse dug up and the stomach analyzed for traces of drugs which led me to fantasize: Can you imagine anything more thrilling than getting to stick your hand and forearm through the hole in Elvis's rotted guts slopping whatever's left of 'em all over each other getting the intestinal tracts mixed up with the stomach lining mixed up with the kidneys as you forage fishing for incriminating pillchips sufficient to slap this poor sweating doctor 20,000 years in Sing Sing and add one more hot clip to Geraldo's brochure of heroically humanitarian deeds done entirely in the interests of bringing the public the TRUTH it has a constitutional right to know down to the last emetic detail which they in time get as you pull your arm out of dead Elvis's innards triumphantly clenching some crumbs off a few Percodans, Quaaludes, Desoxyns, etc. etc. etc. and then once off camera now here's where the real kick to end 'em all comes as you pop those little bits of crumbled pills in your own mouth and swallow 'em and get high on drugs that not only has Elvis Presley himself also gotten high on the exact same not brand but the pills themselves they've been laying up there inside him perhaps even aging like fine wine plus of course they're all slimy with little bits of the disintegrating insides of Elvis's pelvis SO YOU'VE ACTUALLY GOTTEN TO EA T THE KING OF ROCK 'N' ROLL! which would be the living end in terms of souvenirs, fetishism, psychofandom, the collector's mentality, or even just hero-worship in general. Notice I am leaving out such pursuits as necrophilia and coprophagy-there are admittedly some rather delicate distinctions to be made here, some fine lines to be drawn, but to those so insensitive as not to perceive them I will simply say that calling this act something like "necrophilia" would be in poor taste and if there was one thing Elvis always stood for it was good taste and maintaining the

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highest standards that money could buy so fuck you, you're just jealous, go dig up Sid Vicious and eat him, but if you do please save some for me because I'd like if possible just a small say 3" x 3" hunk out of his flank because what I want to do is eat the flesh under the skin, then dry the epidermis itself which isn't all that tasty anyway and slip it in the sleeve of my copy of Sid Sinas as a souvenir to show my grandchildren and perhaps take out and wrap around my dick every once in a while when I'm masturbating cause a little more friction always helps get the wank achieved and sometimes I have found that when I literally can't get it up to jerk off because I'm too alienated from everything including my own cock if I take a scrap of dried skin from a dead rockstar-trade you an Al Wilson in mint condition well as mint as dead can be anyway for a Jim Morrison I don't care how shot to shit-it really seems to do the trick. But I digress. Jerking off with some of Sid's track-riddled forearm could not even be called child's play compared to the exquisite sensation of eating those pills and gore out of Elvis. I mean, I read Terry Southern's "The Blood of a Wig" too, but that was written before the age of the celebrity, as Marisa Berenson told People magazine when they put her on the cover: "My ambition is to become a saint." My ambition is to become a parasite on saints, which shouldn't be too difficult, I mean they're supposed to get holier through physical mortification and all that, right? Plus I know about how Idi Amin used to dine on the flesh and drink the blood of his onetime enemies while lecturing their severed heads in a line on the desk in his office concerning the improprieties they committed while alive so I don't need to go get The Golden Bouah just to prove to everybody else what I already know because it's simple horse sense which is if I eat a little bit of Elvis (the host, as it were, or is that mixing mythologic metaphors?) then I take on certain qualities possessed by Elvis while he was alive and walking around or laying in bed with the covers over his head as the case may be, and when these pills make me high they'll put me on the Elvis trip to end 'em all as I'll be seeing what he saw and thinking what he thought perhaps up to the last final seconds before kicking the bucket and if all of this works well enough as it most certainly will I intend to be greedy when offered the chance of a lifetime and scoop out a whole giant rotten glob of his carcass

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that let's face it he's never gonna need again and I eat from deep in the heart of him as I fully intend to do, why, THEN I WILL BE ELVIS! I'll make several dozen unwatchable movies and that number plus a couple dozen more unlistenable albums! I'll know karate so I can kick out the eyeballs of my landlord next time he comes up here to complain I haven't paid the rent in three months! Like I'm sure he's gonna come complaining to Elvis about something as piddling as rent anyway! Ditto for Master Charge, Macy's, all these assholes hounding me for money I don't have and they don't need: I mean, seriously, can you imagine Elvis sitting down with his checkbook and a stack of unpaid bills, going through the whole dreary monthly routine, and then balancing his bank account? He'd just go out and buy a car for some colored cleaning lady he'd never met before instead! Then Master Charge would tear up the bill saying "Mr. Presley you are a real humanitarian and since we are too we want to say we feel honored to have you run up as high a tab as you want on us." Lessee, now, what else can I do? Well, concerts. Kinda boring, tho, since all I've gotta do (all I'm ALLOWED to do if I'm gonna not insult Elvis's memory by breaking with tradition) is just stand there holding a microphone, singing current schmaltz with no emotion, and occasionally wiping the sweat off my brow with one of a series of hankies hidden away in the sleeve of my White Castle studded jacket and then toss the contaminated little rag to whichever female in the first few rows has walked more backs, blackened more eyes and broken more arms and legs in attempt to get up close to my godly presence. As my whole career has surely borne out, I believe with one hand on my mother's grave that aggressive persistence in the service of a noble cause should be rewarded. Still, all this, ah, don't you think it sounds kinda, well, dull? I mean, how many hankies can you throw out before you start to go catatonic? At least Sid Vicious got to walk onstage with "GIMME A FIX" written in blood on his chest and bash people in the first row over the head with his bass if he didn't approve of the brand of beercan they were throwing at him. Sid got to have all the fun. -Lester Bangs, "Notes for Review of Peter Guralnick's Lost Hishway, 1980," published in Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Duns, U.S.A., 1987

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The words in this pamphlet are not set out in the order in which they appear on the record, instead I have laid them out in the 3 groups in which I conceived them. (I) 6 corpses in the mouths of the Bourgoisie (2) 4 songs (3) ALBION, AWAKE!

-Notes by Chris Cutler in booklet of lyrics enclosed with Art Bears LP The World as It Is Today, U.K., 1981

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Well, that's my story-and I'm stickin to that. So let's have another drink and-let's talk about the blues. Blues is about di8nity. It's about self-respect, and no matter what they take away from you, that's yours for keeps. I remember how it was, how every medium, TV and papers and radio and all those people were saying, "You're on the scrapheap, you're useless," and I remember how easy it was to start believin that, and I remember how you'd hear people take it for 8ranted that it was true, just because someone with ah, an ounce of power said so. That's a problem now: too many oddballs, pocket-book sociologists and would-be philosophers with an axe to grind-but there's a solution! It's not easy; it's a matter of comin to terms in your heart with the situation you're in, and not havin things forced upon you. There're plenty of forces against you, forcing you against your will and your ideals. You've got to hope for the best-and that's the best you can hope for. It's hope against hope. I remember something Sal Paradise said. He said, "The city intellectuals of the world are divorced from the folk bloody body of the land and are just rootless fools!" So listen-when the smile, the condescending pat on the back comes and says, "We're sorry, but you're nothing, you've got nothing for us and we've got nothing for you"-you say, no, and say it loud, NO! Remember: People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referrin explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and positive in the refusal of constraints-such people have a corpse in their mouth. -Pete Wylie/Wah!, "The Story of the Blues, Part One and Part Two," U.K., 1982

Dr. Allen Nadler reports that Chico has yet another claim to the title of culinary capital of the West: La Salle's, a great hangout, is now featuring the Belushi Burger-"Sloppy But Good." -Herb Caen, San Francisco Chronicle, 1982

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-Ray Lowry, New Musical Express, London, 1983 Pop is a frustration machine. And one of its most interesting mechanisms is the tension between the star's incitement of desire and passion (not to mention hysteria) and the bureaucratic and ideological apparatus erected to protect stars from the consequences of this incitement. At one point we interview Adam Ant's manager, Don Murfet, an expert in personal security. . . . Don turned out to be a wise and benevolent man, as genuinely concerned for the well-being of fans as stars. One month after this interview, his protege Adam Ant appears on the front cover of Sounds, glowering lustily at all and sundry with both hands tucked into gaping flies. What was a fan to think? It is hardly surprising, when stars offer themselves so lavishly for consumption, that some fans will take the invitation literally. Like Mark Chapman. After all, the only plausible way to "consume" people is to annihilate them. -Fred and]udy Vermorel, Starlust: The Secret Fantasies of Fans, London, 1985

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Burger King can't be getting over on the food, it must be the artwork. Burger King does what the Comte de Lautreamont and his surrealist followers only dreamed about. It creates a decadence you can taste. Burger King sells the whole world the same democratic hamburger and to each burger buyer they say, "Have it your way." ... And the hamburger is the most symbolic of foods. It is round, like the body of Christ in the Mass, but it's also hot and juicy. Like Frankenstein, it is a body made of many bodies. -Glenn O'Brien, Artforum, U.S.A., April 1986 Sable sauntered in to the Burger Lord. It was exactly like every other Burger Lord in America. McLordy the Clown danced in the Kiddie Korner. The serving staff had identical gleaming smiles that never reached their eyes. And behind the counter a chubby, middle-aged man in a Burger Lord uniform slapped burgers onto the griddle, whistling softly, happy in his work. Sable went up to the counter. "Hello-my-name-is-Marie," said the girl behind the counter. "Howcan-I-help-you?" "A double blaster thunder biggun, extra fries, hold the mustard," he said. "Anything-to-drink?" "A special thick whippy chocobanana shake." She pressed the little pictogram squares on her till. (Literacy was no longer a requirement for employment in these restaurants. Smiling was.) Then she turned to the chubby man behind the counter. "DBTB, EF, hold mustard," she said. "Choc-shake." "Uhnnhuhn," crooned the cook. He sorted the food into little paper containers, pausing only to brush the graying cowlick from his eyes. "Here y'are," he said. She took them without looking at him, and he returned cheerfully to his griddle, singing quietly, "Loooove me tender, looooove me long, neeever let me go...." The man's humming, Sable noted, clashed with the Burger Lord background music, a tinny tape loop of the Burger Lord commercial jingle, and he made a mental note to have him fired. -Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of A8nes Nutter, Witch, U.S.A., 1990

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A man dies and they want to serve him up for posterity. Serve him, so to speak, trussed up for our dear descendants at the table. So that they, napkin tucked under chin and armed with knife and fork, can dig in to the freshly deceased. The deceased, as you know, have the inconvenient habit of cooling off too slowly, they're burning hot. So they are turned into aspics by pouring memories over them-the best form of gelatine. And since deceased greats are also too large, they are cut down. The nose, they say, is served separately, or the tongue. You need less 8elatine that way, too. And that's how you get yesterday's classic, a freshly cooked tongue-in-aspic. With a side dish of hoofs from the horse he used to ride. -Blind fragment in untitled collage by Elvis Costello, 1989

Glenn Gass

Why Don't We Do It in the Classroom?

I

t could be a scene out of any college classroom at exam time: the nervous looks, head-pounding and frustrated I-knew-thatlast-night expressions as the students grope to remember if Brian Jones was (a) the leader of the Beach Boys? (b) the Beatles's manager? (c) one of the original Rolling Stones? (d) none of the above? Brian Jones?! The correct answer, by the way, is "c." The next question on more than a few minds might be, "Why is this being taught in a college class?" (a) because university standards have sunk to new lows? (b) because music departments need the money generated by large course enrollments? (c) because rock is a vital musical form and cultural force? (d) because Brian Jones was also a classical violinist of exceptional ability? Again the answer is "c," though opinions on that vary, to say the least (and "b" would, too often, be a correct response as well). In spite of the predictable complaints and resistances, classes on rock music, such as the series of rock history courses I teach at Indiana University,

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are being offered by a rapidly growing number of universities, reflecting a general trend toward interdepartmental studies of popular culture that is only now reaching most music schools and conservatories. Rollover, Beethoven: thirty-seven years after Elvis's first recordings, rock has its own traditions and its own treasured "classics." Seeing Rock & Roll next to Symphonic Literature and Music Appreciation in course listings must seem like a nightmare come true for more traditionally minded faculty members whose view of culture involves a refined sensibility that must be learned and earned. Rock courses are still waging the same struggle for acceptance that jazz studies faced on their way to becoming standard offerings, and facing the same prejudices that view "popular" as synonymous with cheap, crude, and unrefined. I know I get my share of horrified looks when "Satisfaction" comes blasting out of my classroom. Composer Milton Babbitt once lamented that his students studied "serious" music all day, then went home and listened to "the same music the janitors liked." 1 As Allan Bloom put it, ''[Rock music] ruins the imagination of young people and makes it very difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education.... [A]s long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say." 2 The Great Tradition is apparently in serious trouble, and rock music makes an easy target for those who need something to blame for the fact that classical music is losing the depressingly small audience it had to begin with. On the other hand, the Great Tradition itself is an easy target in these politically correct times. Rock's assault on academia mirrors a heightened interest in world music and ethnomusicology and a general acknowledgment of the need to move beyond the near religious canonization of Western (white male) art music that has been the entire focus of musical higher education. 3 It seems, though, that the validity granted the popular musics of other cultures is only grudgingly granted that of our own, and that even when ours is approached, rock and pop still tend to be viewed merely as illegitimate offspring of "authentic" musics like the blues, country, and gospel. As a classical composer and rock fan who likes Milton Babbitt and Bruce Springsteen (and a lot of other things serious musi-

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cians and janitors listen to), t have a hard time understanding how anyone could argue with the simple assertion that the best of any type of music can reward repeated listening and, in a classroom, help to sharpen aural skills and musical awareness. Ideally, one could hope that studying one type of music will inspire students to explore another, that rock history will lead to jazz and classical appreciation courses. This happens occasionally and should surely be encouraged (this is often used as a rationale for nontraditional offerings). Most often, though, the students who enroll in rock courses would otherwise avoid music offerings and will probably not take another-all the more reason to reach them now, any way we can. Since they will listen to rock & roll in any case, why not help them to listen more creatively and with greater insight into the music's history, techniques, and cultural role? Granted, it's still hard to compare "Tutti Frutti" with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, but why compare them? Rock music-indeed, all music-must be approached and appreciated within the context of the era and aesthetic in which it was created, and at the same time made fresh and vital for today. The amateurish quality, in the best and worst senses, of most rock music does pose special problems in the classroom, but it also offers an opportunity to address and discuss the music on the type of straightforwardly emotional level too often neglected in traditional music courses. There are, of course, many musical elements to notice as well: songwriting and vocal styles, instrumental and production techniques, song forms, band arrangements, musical influences, lyrical references, and rhythmic patterns, to mention only a few. But rock & roll can be as dull and repetitious as some of my classical colleagues say if it is approached with the same methods and criteria one applies to a Mozart sonata-if Bob Dylan's voice is evaluated as if he were auditioning for the Met, or if the chord structure of "Louie Louie" and the melodic contours of "Mother Popcorn" are analyzed in terms of pitch sets and Schenkerian reductions. Theoretical abstractions and rote memorization tend to take students further away from the music itself, while musical transcriptions and technical analyses are scarcely more effective at getting at the energy that made the music so exciting to begin with. In trying to make sure that I teach rock & roll for the same reasons

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that I love it, I find that I constantly walk a tightrope between the need to make my courses "serious" enough for a college classroom and fun enough to keep Keith Richards from gagging, should he happen to wander in. It's a hard balancing act, though I try to err on the side of irreverence and make no apologies for having strong personal tastes that are inevitably reflected in course material. My first concern is that students know and love the music-learning details about the music is important, but secondary. Even then, I try to focus on what they hear and on what made the artist unique, and tend to shy away from pointless guitar solo transcriptions or overly technical discussions of chord progressions, "rock lyrics as poetry," rock as "ritual dance music for a new tribe of disaffected youth," and the like. The music itself needs no justification and yields its own rewards as long as it is not forced into a strict analytic model or academicism that loses sight of the music's emotional power, spontaneity, and sheer fun. The strict "cultural studies" approach to rock music gaining currency in academic classes and journals can, with the best intentions, render an even greater disservice by focusing so exclusively on audience responses, ideological agendas, mind-numbing charts of lyrical references, and abstract, post-Marxist theories on the popular that tend to ignore the fact that these are son8s, written, played, and sung by real people with guitars in their hands. This peculiar type of reverse discrimination tends to validate popular music, only to consign it to a cultural studies ghetto where it is still "only rock & roll," but now interesting as an assumed background "text" that gains importance when it is manifested as a function of youth, a product consumed in fascinating ways, a reflection of society, class structures, etc. These are all important issues, to be sure, but "Eight Days a Week" is just fine all by itself, too. There are, of course, many rewarding approaches to rock/pop music possible within the framework of a university. Sociology, English, Cultural Studies, Telecommunications, Comparative Literature, and other departments-even Music departments-can all embrace rock & roll as a legitimate and compelling topic applicable to their interests. The fact that it is a popular subject and already an integral part of most students' lives should be cause for celebration rather than scorn. Isn't helping students make sense of their own lives, world, and culture one of the central aims of higher education?

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While some still argue that rock will "cheapen" curricula and academic standards, there is a different and more valid concern coming from the opposite direction-that rock's ascent to the classroom is, at best, a hollow victory for such gloriously unacademic music. Whether or not rock "deserves" to be taken so seriously, it certainly never asked to be taken so seriously. At the 1990 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, Kinks leader Ray Davies looked out at the sea of tuxedos and noted that rock & roll "has become respectable." Visibly shaken by the applause (applause?!) that greeted his remark, Davies quickly added "what a bummer." Indeed, the last-and worst-thing anyone thought rock & roll could ever become was "respectable," yet here it is, crammed into tuxedos at awards ceremonies, embraced by middle-aged babyboomers, exploited by Madison Avenue as an effective marketing tool and fast achieving the ultimate stamp of legitimacy as a subject for college classes. How respectable can you get? Or, more to the point, how respectable can rock get before it loses the very urgency and rebellious spirit that made it so exciting to begin with? The Band's Robbie Robertson once said that "music should never be harmless," but isn't rock rendered exactly that when it is studied in a classroom and assigned as homework? You must address historical and musical details, but can students get emotionally involved with Little Richard while they're worrying about remembering who his sax players were or what year he recorded "Long Tall Sally" or whether it's a 12-bar blues? Those questions continue to haunt me, as I'm sure they haunt many others trying to force "All along the Watchtower" into the Ivory Tower, though my misgivings about the classroom as a viable arena for rock have lessened over the years. When I was first hired, much to my surprise, to teach jazz and rock history at a junior college in Wisconsin in 1977, the thought of sticking rock in a classroom and assigning it as homework seemed absurd. I was quite comfortable with the musical schizophrenia that separated my classical training and composing from my love for rock & roll and feared that combining the two would cheapen both (the same sort of feeling I had later when I heard the Kronos Quartet playing "Purple Haze"). The rock music I loved still seemed too new to be "history," too emotionally personal to discuss coherently, and far too exciting and rebellious to be deemed respectable enough for a college class. In those disco-

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mad days, though, it seemed that rock might indeed be history, as in "dead." I quickly learned, for example, that my students had only the faintest knowledge that the recently deceased King of Rock & Roll had ever been anything but a running joke on late-night movies. Most had never heard of-much less heard-Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, Martha Reeves, Roy Orbison, or Smokey Robinson, and were quite surprised to learn that Linda Ronstadt wasn't the first to sing "That'll Be the Day," "When Will I Be Loved" and "Heatwave," not to mention "Blue Bayou" and "l"'racks of My Tears." Not all of the students were of the "I hear Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings" variety, but enough had never heard "Great Balls of Fire" to make me think there was a point to teaching rock after all, if only to make sure they'd heard it. There are still college students who have never listened to Jerry Lee Lewis, but, happily, far fewer these days. Yesterday's hits, formerly relegated to the Oldies bins and a few AM nostalgia stations, are now enshrined as Classic Rock-timeless works of the Old Masters who live on in CD reissues and reunion tours and carry the weight of their legacy like an elderly Stravinsky conducting the Rite of Sprin8. Free from the confines of MTV and specific video imprints, they live on as songs, suspended in time for each new listener to claim, define, and apply to his or her own life (unless they have already been rendered lifeless in California Raisins or Coke commercials). Even the newer artists tend to define their stance and claims to "authenticity" in terms of rock's glory days, many invoking their ancestors directly with reverent covers of old hits or with sounds, images, and fashions that evoke the aura of rock's noble and defiant past. For all the new stars, trends, and technologies that appeared in the 1980s, the decade seemed dominated by triumphant comebacks, rock anniveraries-of the Summer of Love, Woodstock, the Beatles hitting America-and one musical "revival" after another, ranging from the rockabilly revival that opened the decade to the psychedelic revival that closed it, with blues, heavy metal, folk, mainstream pop, roots rock, traditional country & western, and even punk and disco revivals thrown in along the way, as if the basic parameters within which rock works had all been explored and fixed by the end of the 1970s. There were also, of course, plenty of new stars, visions, and voices

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to give rock's heritage a personal stamp, and plenty of rap groups and alternative bands to prove that it has not all been done or said. Most of my students, nonetheless, continue to list bands and albums from the 1960s as their personal favorites and seem quite fascinated by that decade (especially for a generation otherwise known for its historical amnesia); more than a few dress and act as if they'd just returned from Woodstock and none of them were alive when Woodstock took place! Classic rock is history to them, their Great Tradition, and the giggles at getting course credit for rock & roll, and the delight at "pulling one over on their parents" I encountered a decade ago, have been replaced by a genuine desire to learn about rock's heritage-the type of searching curiosity that should make even Allan Bloom feel heartened. The reaction of my students' parents has changed even more dramatically: I used to spend a good deal of time writing notes explaining that "Rock History" was indeed a real and worthwhile class; these days I spend more time fending off parents' requests for copies of my class listening tapes and nodding politely as they tell me how happy they are that their sons and daughters are being exposed to good music like the Beatles and Elvis rather than the junk they play on the radio. It's getting harder for rock to perform its most crucial function (driving parents crazy) now that Dad keeps yelling "Turn it up!" or "I used to love that song!" In any case, it's worth remembering that most current college students were first exposed to "classic" rock by their parents; and instead of rebelling against it, they found lyrics that still spoke to their lives and concerns, and a musical vitality undimmed by the decades. Although this might be a rather sad commentary on the music scene of today and the suffocating media stranglehold of the babyboomers and "classic rock," it also speaks well of rock's ability to retain its youth and resonance, and bolsters the arguments for rock as a musical form of lasting value that deserves attention, even in classrooms. Rock & roll is here to stay, as they say, or said, thirty-three years ago (Danny and the Juniors, that is, Question #23, answer "b"). Its uniquely American roots in blues, rhythm & blues, boogie-woogie, country & western, pop, and gospel musics make it a fascinating melting pot that should be a great source of interest and pride. Still rightly claimed as "our music" by each new generation, rock's em-

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bodiment of the dreams, values, experience, and worldview of those generations also offers a vital focal point for discussions of recent times and culture. The current controversies surrounding rap and heavy metal prove that even its ability to challenge and threaten remains intact. It's heartening, in a way, to hear Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), the archbishop of New York, several state legislatures and other defenders of morals attacking rock & roll, and heartening for the same reasons to know that there are still plenty of people who think rock has no business in a college classroom. The day rock truly becomes respectable will be sad indeed, but it might be inevitable. We're close enough to it already to make poor Brian Jones roll in his grave: "Satisfaction" has become homework, his former bandmates are encased in the Hall of Fame, and by now he could have been a Distinguished Professor. Notes Milton Babbitt, lecture at Indiana University, 1987. Allan Bloom, The ClosinB of the American Mind: How HiBher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York, 19 87), 7980. 3 The history and fallacy of our obsession with the Great Tradition is presented convincingly in a paper by Austin B. Caswell, "How We Got into Canonicity and What It Has Done to Us: An American Music Historian's View of Music in Academia," forthcoming in theJournal of Aesthetic Education. 1

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Playing for England

Without a doubt, the biggest cultural event of the summer of 1990 in Britain was the one for which about half the population stayed at home every night over a period of about three weeks. That event was the World Cup soccer finals which were held in Italy and which, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation, were also represented on television in some way in every country of the world, producing a total television audience of about twenty-six billion people (with over half of that audience in Asia). The prelude to the visit of the England national soccer team to this year's finals was the occasion for a set of quite telling fears and hopes in the culture. The hopes centered around the sense in the media and on the streets that the team had a relatively good chance of getting to the final game, even if no one was foolhardy enough to predict that they would actually win the World Cup. Such hopes were finally not entirely disappointed since the team did reach the semifinal round and performed creditably enough. One reason that

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the expectations were not stronger was that most British football players had for several years been deprived of the useful experience of playing against European teams; that was because British club teams had been banned from the various European cup competitions in the wake of the 1985 Heysel disaster in Brussels, where British (specifically, Liverpool) football supporters were held to be responsible for thirty-nine deaths and hundreds of injuries, mostly to Italian supporters, during a disturbance in the stadium. The Heysel disaster-undoubtedly the most lethal of many incidents involving British soccer fans over the last two or three decades-informed many of the fears that attended the popular media's preparation for the 1990 World Cup finals: that is, it was widely suspected that this tournament would become the site for England's renowned soccer hooligans to exercise their peculiar brand of warfare against the soccer supporters of other European nations and particularly against the host Italians. Elaborate arrangements were thus made to try to head off the possibilities of violence. The England team's first games were subject to a kind of quarantine by dint of their being located on the island of Sardinia. The island itself was turned into a paramilitary fortress by soldiers, uniformed police, undercover agents, and the appearance at least once of a brigade of Italy's special anti-terrorist forces. Back home in England the Conservative Minister of Sport, Colin Moynihan, gave his moral blessing to any steps, however repressive or unfair, that the Italian authorities might wish to take to counter the greatly feared English football supporter. Alcohol was banned on the island for ~he period; Italian immigration officers regularly refused entry to unsavory looking characters; police in Sardinia periodically arrested, imprisoned overnight, and then deported individuals and groups of Britons without the intervention of courts, and so on. The British Minister of Sport was subjected to some criticism at home for his condoning of this official activity; often the criticism came from his right wing in the form of a complaint that he was being hypocritical since he had proved himself unwilling to take such draconian measures against the supporters who are popularly presumed to terrorize the high streets of British towns every Saturday afternoon during the football season. The Thatcher government made some slow attempts to curb and

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repress the often dangerous presence and behavior of the football supporter, particularly in the wake of the Heysel Stadium event and after several other quite serious domestic disturbances around football games. A Home Office report in 1986 had laid a good part of the blame for hooliganism on the state of the football stadiums, most of which were designed and built between the turn of the century and World War II. The report also attempted to grasp the nature of hooliganism by appealing to some categories of sporting violence designed in the crassest and most positivistic American sociological tradition; but those kinds of explanations of football hooliganism were unable to lead the Home Office Committee to any very insightful conclusions. The Commission's final report proposed measures all aimed at the production of an American-style sports stadium and at audiences which, it is to be assumed, would squeeze out the hooligan element. Rather than fully grapple with the vexed question about what cultural meaning football hooliganism has within British society, the British government has suggested the gradual upgrading of football venues so that they become all-seating stadiums to be patronized only by good citizens who can qualify for a special football supporter's ID card. Those citizens would be protected by beefed-up policing: the police would have unlimited rights of search and widened powers of arrest, new criminal offenses would be put on the books for sports grounds, and alcohol sales would be severely restricted. These solutions all suggest, I think, that those who would attempt to regulate hooliganism and the everyday violence of British football grounds have little or no interest in seeing them as symptoms of subcultural resistance, or even of class ressentiment, but are rather more invested in thinking of them simply as criminal or pathological activities to be dealt with by the repressive state apparatuses. l For the purposes of the World Cup finals, the British government's attempts to head off the much-expected violence and disruption actually took the form of an attempt to curtail the travel of known (that is, previously convicted) hooligans. The British police shared information with the European Interpol network and also assigned plainclothes policemen to travel with suspect groups of fans. In general, the level of cooperation among the security forces of the European nations was high during this period. The Dutch and German

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police, especially, worked hand in hand with the British and Italians, since the fans of those four nations have historically had especially troubled relations at footballing events, and each country has its hooligan problem. Yet it was still the British fan who was assumed to be the most potentially dangerous. In some ways this is not surprising, given the history of violence among football supporters and given, too, their sometimes very close identification with neo-fascist movements in Britain. The often noticeably far rightist sentiments of some among the British football hooligans have their echoes and manifestations in the soccer cultures of other European nations, especially in Germany. But the British configuration is perhaps the clearest, thrown into sharp relief when the discourse of neo-fascism vies with-and all too easily resembles-the discourse of the Conservatives over issues of British nationalism and patriotism. By dint of this resemblance, football hooliganism can be read as a somewhat unwelcome alter ego of the Thatcherite regime. Thus when the Sports Minister mouthed his views about the virtues of repression against these animals who watch football, one could almost get the impression that the plan was to allow and even encourage a displacement of the soccer hooligan problem to another site where official repression could be undertaken under the auspices of the necessity of keeping this world-stage event safe and disturbance-free. There are some grounds for thinking this: particularly, the summer of 1990 was also expected to be the moment of massive popular rebellion against Margaret Thatcher's newly activated poll tax. The poll tax (a name, incidentally, which Thatcher's government spokespersons were instructed not to use, Thatcher preferring the name "community charge") is a tax to replace the system of property taxes or "rates" that had funded local government programs throughout most of this century in Britain; whereas the rates had taxed households according to land and property values in a relatively progressive manner, the poll tax is a regressive tax that places a burden on every adult person at the same rate. It's fair to say, I think, that the poll tax was and still is a deeply unpopular, and at least divisive, tax. The first unmistakable sign of this was the huge demonstration in ~rrafalgar

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Square on 31 March 1990 that greeted the changeover from rates to the poll tax. This demonstration was followed up by multiple events across the country during the summer. The poll tax was also attacked at the level of the appeals court, where its legality was finally upheld. However, popular refusals to pay the tax led to a number of mass legal summonses in different parts of the country during the summer, in the course of every single one of which the courts found reasons not to convict nonpayers of the tax. The first major case of that sort on the Isle of Wight involved nearly four thousand summonses. Most of the delinquent taxpayers turned up at the court hearings along with many other opponents of the tax, and the normally orderly and placid procedure of local governmental business was massively disrupted. The court in this instance forced the local authority to withdraw the summonses on the grounds that reminders had been sent out by the notoriously inefficient second-class postage rate, leaving insufficient time between the reminders and the subsequent summonses. This case and its somewhat factitious ruling set the tone for many later such cases, such as one in Newcastle where the local council withdrew its summonses because their documentation had not distinguished between monies owed for the tax itself and monies owed by way of penalty. By and large the courts seemed to prefer to leave local government with the problems of collection and enforcement, or simply with the prospect of depleted budgets, rather than to provoke more popular discontent and resistance than was already being manifested. Here, as in the exporting of the soccer hooligan problem to Italy, the government's effective action in relation to potential civic disturbance was to make a certain amount of noise and to rely upon various confirmatory rulings of the higher courts in deciding the general legality of the tax, but at the same time to refuse direct confrontation with the forces of resistance and malaise. The poll tax issue has not yet disappeared, even after the fall of Margaret Thatcher whose hobbyhorse the tax was widely assumed to be; but it seems that the new Prime Minister, John Major, in his first few months of office, has stepped back considerably from the hard Thatcher line on the poll tax and that its nature will be massively revised in the

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near future. In that sense the popular resistance to this tax might be said to have succeeded in its aim, and even to have helped unseat Thatcher herself. 2 The important point, for me, about the stories of the poll tax and the apprehension about soccer violence in Italy is that they were both direct challenges to the ideologies and indeed the policies of law and order which the Thatcher government had highlighted during its time in office. By the summer of 1990 the somewhat facile options that the Conservatives had for ten or more years exercised or proposed in relation to questions of crime and civil disturbance had led to widespread media and public discussion of a possible, or indeed probable, summer of trouble. Prognoses of this sort turned out to be somewhat off the mark in the sense that neither soccer hooliganism nor poll tax resistance led to the kind of widespread or profound civic disturbance that might have been expected. Indeed, the fears of the law-and-order party were perhaps most vindicated in altogether different arenas. First of all, the summer of 1990 saw the IRA step up its bombing campaign in Britain and Europe; they scored a notable success with the bombing of the elite Conservative party club, the Carleton, in June, yet suffered the embarrassment of killing some Australian tourists, having mistaken them for British servicemen in Europe. Second, there was the announcement in late June of a quite remarkable rise in crime statistics. Notifiable offences reported to the police during the first quarter of 1990 showed an increase of 15 percent, the most precipitous such rise in over thirteen decades, and one that provoked the Guardian newspaper to talk about a veritable "tide of fear" crossing the country.3 The party of law and order was reduced to pointing out that, in Thatcher's words, we "have to remember that violent crime in this country is on a very much lesser scale than in some other countries." 4 It is in the context of this widespread apprehension about violence, civic disturbance, and popular ressentiment, and indeed in the context of the ultimate failure of those issues to actually confirm the worst fears of the media and the establishment, that I want to turn a bit more squarely to the pretext of this paper: "World in Motion," a single by the band New Order, and its place in the rock music scene during the summer of 1990.

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A large sector of Britain's rock culture has historically been more attuned than the American or European rock cultures to the political conditions in which it operates-at least, I'd say that's been more consistently true in Britain than elsewhere, and thus there has been constructed a wide range of cultural practices and institutions by means of which rock music and its performance intervene in overtly politicized contexts. In relation to the poll tax opposition last summer, rock appeared to be playing a familiar kind of role, with many bands playing benefits for the numerous anti-poll tax organizations that were quickly set up in the early part of the year. Those interventions are not unexpected, of course; indeed they are almost de rigueur in a rock industry whose rhetoric of subcultural opposition and whose resistant display remain crucial affectations, and crucial marketing components. Furthermore, it is especially not surprising to see such interventions in this instance since the poll tax represents a new and increased taxation on the young, the working class, and the poor. Many young people, for instance, who as renters had been exempt from the old form of rates, or who were subsumed under household taxation and thus were paid for by parents, suddenly found themselves subject to an annual poll tax imposition. Thus a tax such as this one is in a sense the natural enemy of a large sector of rock music's constituency. To a certain extent, the rock music culture did respond to the challenge of the poll tax, which had also given a considerable fillip to a number of leftists political groups and organizations that, like several anarchist groups and the Socialist Workers party, were attached to the popular dismay. One of the effects of Britain's preparing itself for a summer of thunder, for a massive outbreak of football violence and for the expression of popular dissent in terms of the poll tax, was the distraction of attention from some of the chronic problems that have been brought to a head in the last dozen years under Thatcher, particularly from problems of racial tension that have been of late the most likely site of civic disturbance in British life, and from the problems in the economy that were exacerbated by Thatcher's twin-headed policy of making Britain an American-style laissez-faire capitalist power and at the same time flirting with but never completely accepting the federalization of the European countries into the European Community.

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Arguably the latter problems in the economy have, since the summer of 1990, brought the downfall of Thatcher, while the problems of race and ethnicity were and continue to be elided under the Conservatives. But during the months of June and July 1990, the threat of violence and civic disturbance was a consistent strand of discussion in most of the popular newspapers, magazines, and on the television. As it happens, the promised thunder was not to come-at least not in the extreme forms that were promised. The football supporters were relatively untroublesome, despite a couple of ugly incidents in Sardinia and despite many of them being arrested and deported by overzealous Italian police. And the poll tax agitations were somewhat declawed by the courts' stepping back from judgment, as it were. Instead of the summer of our discontent that various media were promising, the summer became what the youth culture magazine, The Face, was pleased to call "The Third Summer of Love." S The first "summer of love" had been in 1988 with the burgeoning in the largely white youth culture in the English Midland cities (Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool in particular) of a revamped 1960S or hippy style and ideology in music, drugs, and dress. The hallucinogen Ecstasy became the drug of choice, more or less replacing LSD after that drug's revival in the early 1980s. At the same time, Acid House music began its reign in the clubs, bearing a lot of similarity in ethos to the hippy revival. Acid House, despite generally being taken as an evolution from Chicago House music, owes a great deal to the British reggae tradition, particularly to dub reggae, even while it has transformed that tradition to become, in Simon Reynolds's words, "close to the frigid, mechanical, supremely white perversion of funk perpetrated by early eighties pioneers like D.A.F. and Cabaret Voltaire."6 Acid is in that sense, according to Reynolds, a supremely alienated form of black music, loosed from the various strands of black musical traditions. Acid is similar to neo-psychedelia not so much in rhythmic quality (it is almost frighteningly metronomic, set strictly at somewhere between 125 and 135 beats per minute), but in what Reynolds calls the encouragement of "perceptual drift," and what both he and Helena Blakemore see as the production of transitory, ephemeral, and trance-like experience.? The melding of these two kinds of music became increasingly ap-

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parent in 1989, the second "summer of love." The club scene was largely transported as a matter of course to illegal venues like warehouses and temporary, unlicensed clubs. Outside London, in Manchester, for instance, these illegal parties, or raves, became a point of attention for the police as the audiences became increasingly ethnically mixed and as blissing out on Ecstasy became epidemic. These first two "summers of love" had been in many ways the manifestation of a kind of passive resistance to the conditions of Thatcherite Britain, and an expression of alienation from that context; thus their manifestations had attracted the requisite amount of police and media disapproval. The "summer of love" in 1990, however, turned out somewhat differently. With the government and the police focusing on other potential problems, the drug scene and the illegal raves were more or less left alone. Although in the early spring the police had threatened various harrassment tactics, the restrictions on 1990 raves turned out to be mostly just a few bureaucratic ones. This left the raves and festivals to develop according to their own logic. At the level of the music itself, Acid House consolidated its joining with the neo-psychedelic music of the Manchester and Liverpool bands. As Reynolds noted in 1988: "House has been bordering on the psychedelic for some time ... with the spaciness of its dub effects, its despotic treatment of the voice and its interference with the normal ranking of instruments in the mix (encouraging 'perceptual drift')."8 The marriage of the two modes readily gave preeminence to the more familiar and commercial melodiousness of neopsychedelia, over the alienated trance qualities of Acid House. Thus the bands centered on Manchester, the so-called scallydelics like Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets, or The Farm, settled into recording contracts and big sales. The independent music scene participated in a massive revival of 1960s hippy music and mixed it with the futurism of Acid House. Helena Blakemore has described Acid House itself as exactly this mixture of revival and futurism, productive of an air of "instant culture."9 One could say that the marriage of Acid and scallydelia marks the appropriation of that instant culture by the music industry for the purpose of prolonging it enough for commodification. At any rate, it was not a big step from what we might call this

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non-nostalgic revivalism in the music itself to the revival during the summer of 1960s-style outdoor rock festivals. Between May and September there were about a dozen rock festivals lasting a day or more, located at outdoor sites and arenas all across the country, all of them more or less unmolested by the police. One of the least invigorating of these was held in June at Knebworth. Cosponsored by the BBC's Radio One and America's MTV, it top-billed a handful of old rock stars like Paul McCartney, Elton John, and Cliff Richard as part of a media industry attempt to appropriate the festival fad. But even the independent festivals turned out to be by and large innocuous and blissed out affairs. The only one that involved any real antagonism between festivalgoers and the authorities was an abortive one that had been planned for the summer solstice at Stonehenge and that finally consisted of about three hundred ravers attended by seven hundred police whose aim was to keep the ancient stone monument safe from hooliganism and vandalism. Apart from their ecstasied innocence, one of the most consistent features of these festivals was the way they demonstrated the full integration of a footballing motif into the styles, performances, and musics of the subculture. In particular, the clothing of the people drew upon what had been a steady rise in the fashionability of various kinds of designer sports clothing: among the multifarious track suits and football shirts adorned with club logos, the distinctive yellow and green strip of the Brazilian national team seemed particularly prominent. These, appended to ubiquitous wide-flared jeans, epitomized the juxtaposition of acid culture with the sports ethos. Inevitably the game itself was played during interludes, and at the Glastonbury Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Festival one band even kicked footballs around on stage (I had last seen that done by Rod Stewart and the Faces in the late 1960s); the crowd duly broke out into a chant of "In-ger-Iund." There is something uncanny about a cross-fertilization of acid culture and football, particularly given the relation to violence that they might respectively be assumed to hold. Earlier in the year, the February issue of i-D magazine (their "Good Health" issue) had pointed out the contradiction in an article on Manchester youth culture. One young Mancunian is quoted thus: "We're not into wearing fucking

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daisies in our hair and all that walking around shouting 'karma fucking peace man.' Fuck that. We like the violence, we like getting off our heads, we like the dancing, the sweat." i-D's comment on this is to suggest simply that "the drippy peace and love optimism of the 60S has been replaced by a harder, more cynical sense of community and local pride based around your band, your area and your football team." One might also add, around your favorite drug: the commitment to hallucinogens among the bands and their followers has had, as i-D points out, "a massive catalytic effect on a whole generation of Thatcher-alienated youth." 10 But the infatuation with football has had, I want to claim, a consolatory or pacificatory effect-it marked a particular way of mainstreaming the House and hippy subcultures, and at the same time constituted an argument against-and an assimilation of-the resistant energies of football subcultures. The alienation that appears to be at the root of all three of those subcultural styles is cancelled out by their confluence during that summer in the celebration of the World Cup finals. Many rock bands capitalized on the World Cup mania during the summer. Perhaps the most amusing of such instances was the single "Touched by the Hand of La Cicciolina," by Pop Will Eat Itself, who urged that the trophy be presented after the final game by La Cicciolina, Italy's best-known porno star and member of parliament; the most irrelevant and irreverent was Saint Etienne's single, "The Official Saint Etienne World Cup Theme"-not official at all and a minimalist dub drone ornamented only by the repeated words, "Cool and deadly"; while perhaps the most banal was the band James announcing its "World Cup Tour," carefully arranged so as not to clash with any soccer dates. For me the most interesting symptom of this infatuation (and perhaps even an effective cause in the infatuation) was the recording of the ritual "official theme song" for the England team by New Order. There has been a tradition, dating back to at least 1966, of marking any major football events involving the England team with a recording by the national squad of some dreadful pop ditty: titles like "Back Home" (1970) or "This Time We'll Get It Right" (1982) featured the whole squad cheerleading in unison. This time, in 1990, the officiating body of English soccer, the Football

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Association, decided to get it right by having the theoreticians of subcultural dance modes, the band New Order, produce the official England theme song. New Order has been perhaps one of the most important bands in British rock over the last decade or so. Beginning life as the legendary joy Division and never entirely eradicating their origins in the minor key drone music of a certain moment in post-punk sensibility, New Order has become the best and the best-known purveyor of a highly polished but minimalist technobeat. Demonstrable forerunners of House, the band has both led the way in and absorbed the influences of the major trends in both dance music and rock in the last decade. Its significance is broader than the extent of its music alone, however. New Order has been for a decade the leading band for Britain's most fiercely independent and influential record label, Factory, and has used profits from sales to reinvest in the local Manchester community, including the establishment of Britain's most notorious club, La Hacienda. In these and other respects, New Order has been an exemplary independent band. New Order's single for the Football Association is called "World in Motion," and the CD version is accompanied by three mixes, the "b-side," the "subbuteo mix" (named after the popular proprietary indoor game of table football), and the "no alIa violenza" mix that very rapidly became the club favorite. In the lyrics of the single, New Order's refusal to make a football song is quite apparent, and the remarks of Barney Sumner, the lead singer, on this point signal the band's attitude: At one stage, the Football Association came to us and made it clear that the song really had to distance itself from hooliganism. Hence our line, 'Love's got the world in motion.' It's an antihooligan song. There's a deliberate ambiguity about the words which don't have to refer to football. I think you're right when you say that pop and football culture are nearer than they've been in years. And from our point of view, there's been a football element in our fans for about the last six years. Even so, there was no way I could have written the lyrics. I really couldn't write a football lyric. II

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As it turns out, the credited lyricist for the song is Keith Allen, a Manchester comedian. His words constitute a deliberate admixture of two lyrical strands: of what is almost a mimicry of New Order's familiar love songs, and what would perhaps be more predictable in a football song. The footballing strand is marked at the very beginning by the voice of Kenneth Wolstenholme, a BBC sports commentator, long since retired, whose name is almost a byword in the culture for the somewhat fatuous and yet strangely endearing mode of football commentating that the British media consistently produce. His opening words recall the England team's one and only outright victory in the World Cup final in 1966, and they are overlaid with a typical New Order drum and synthesizer introduction announcing the song's melody. Sumner's voice enters for two verses with lyrics of which the following give a taste: "Express yourself, create the space. You know you can win, don't give up the chase. Beat the man, take him on. You never give up. It's one on one." While these lyrics perhaps adequately address elements of the sport, the choruses have a little less obviously to do with football: It's one on one, you can't be wrong. When something's good, it's never gone. Love's got the world in motion and I know what we can do; love's got the world in motion and I can't believe it's true. New Order apparently insisted on the phrase "Love's got the world in motion," rejecting the Football Association's preferred chorus, "We've got the world in motion." And the fact that the song became a sort of anthem in gay clubs by virtue of its exhortations to "express yourself ... beat your man ... take him on ... it's one on one," and so on, probably made it even less approvable to that body. What the Football Association undoubtedly did approve of, however, was the introduction of the voice of England's premier black player, John Barnes, in a sort of rap sequence, and his mouthing of the phrases "we ain't no hooligans," and "with three lions on my chest we can't

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go wrong." But even between those lines Barnes clearly states that "this ain't no football song." 12 All in all this is probably the least likely official football theme song ever recorded: denying its own status as a football song, introducing elements of subcultural love lyrics, and becoming a gay club hit, but also assuming the burden of combating football's major peripheral problem, hooliganism, the song is ultimately unheimlich, even despite its closing chorus that speaks of "playing for England; playing this song." It does not quite work as a pseudo-national anthem, and yet it effectively draws together several strands of British subcultural life and merges them into a peculiar cultural product where their elements of resistance leave few traces. The song's gesture of cancelling the resistant elements of its own context-the football and rock subcultures-was not sufficient to make it acceptable to the mainstream media. That is, although the single did well in the clubs and in the charts, it was not much heard in the mainstream media slots to which a different kind of song might have had access. Both the BBC and the independent television companies forewent the pleasure of having "Love's got the world in motion" going across the airwaves every night, and the BBC used as their World Cup theme another piece of music that quickly became a number one hit: Luciano Pavarotti singing his version of the "Nessun Dorma," an aria from Turandot. In its way the well-known Puccini aria is just as unheimlich as the New Order song: one can only imagine that it was meant to be allegorized as the utterance of the footballing prince determined to name himself to the trophy/princess in the morning of his triumph. But the use of this operatic aria, in all its overdetermined Italianicity-which, of course, could be fully exploited in the running patter of the television anchormen-was in many ways appropriate in that it effected a kind of Europeanization of the cultural appurtenances of the World Cup. The World Cup finals was an event that, for all its audience in the South, and for all the playing success of the underdog team from the Cameroons, was ultimately dominated in competition by the countries of the North, and represented in economic terms a massive draining of capital and resources from South America, Africa, and Asia into the coffers of the sponsoring corporations, towns and cities, media networks, and advertising industries

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of Western Europe and the United States (the probable host nation in 1994 and whose team appeared in the finals in Italy for the first time in many years). The world in motion, to be sure: a motion whose nature is underlined by the fact that "World in Motion" represents the first time that New Order's label, Factory Records, has been distributed by the American corporation MeA (itself now taken over by the Japanese mega-corporation, Matsushita). New Order cannot, of course, be held responsible for the workings of this kind of world in motion, any more than Pavarotti can. And yet the band's song, in its abortive attempt to represent a certain kind of populist nationalism, and in its annulment of the resistant energies of its own cultural context (football culture's violent antagonism, and neo-psychedelic subculture's alienation), can be understood as a symptom, or even as a symbol, of the ease with which subcultural forms and energies can be made to contribute to and participate in what we used to call the military-industrial complex, but which I think we really need to call the military-industrial-sports complex.

As I finish writing this article, in the United States in January 1991, the world has set itself in motion by way of a vicious military adventure which, we are told, is designed to help establish a "new world order." British and American airplanes, ships, and soldiers are in the process of demonstrating who truly owns the means of violence and to what ends. Their activities underscore the global nature of the context into which New Order, in their small way, intervened in the summer of 1990. Notes 1

Home Office, Committee of Inquiry into Crowd Safety and Control and Sports Grounds, 1986. A group of British sociologists based at Leicester University have recently provided more insightful work than that of the American sociologistone Jeffrey Goldstein-to whom the Committee had recourse; see Eric Dunning et al., The Roots of Football Hooliaanism: An Historical and Sociological Study (Routledge, 1988) and Eric Dunning et al., Football on Trial (London, 1990). For a brief and conservative overview of the social history of football in Britain, see Tony Mason, "Football," in Sport in Britain: A Social History, ed. Tony Mason (Cambridge, 1989).

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In late March 1991, the poll tax was finally laid to rest with Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine's words: "The public has not been persuaded that the poll tax is fair" (Manchester Guardian Weekly, 31 March 1991,4). Heseltine had been a prominent antagonist to Thatcher for several years; his being named to the postThatcher cabinet was an indication of John Major's desire to move away somewhat from Thatcherite policies. The poll tax has been revised and local authority funds will be collected by way of a mixture of taxes: an increase in value-added tax and a new system of property taxation that seems considerably more progressive. Manchester Guardian Weekly, 8 July 1990, 12. Manchester Guardian, 29 June 1990, I. The Face, June 1990, front cover. Simon Reynolds, Blissed Out: Raptures of Rock (London, 1990), 177. Ibid., 178; and Helena Blakemore, "Acid-Burning a Hole in the Present," in Readinas in Popular Culture, ed. Gary Day (New York, 1990), 18-25. Reynolds, Blissed Out, 177. Blakemore," Acid," 20. Mike Noon, "Freaky Dancing," i-D, February 1990,46-48. Quoted in Stuart Maconie, "Love Will Terrace Apart," New Musical Express, 19 May 1990, 16. As far as Barnes himself is concerned, it's perhaps just as well that the usual vaingloriousness of such official songs was somewhat muted by the other elements and the "deliberate ambiguity" of the song, since his own performances in the finals were, not to put too fine a point on it, lackluster. As the strongest hope for those observers who desired some exotically skilled player to counterbalance the England team's preponderance of journeymen, Barnes had been set up as a classic kind of token. In failing to reproduce the excitement and excellence of his club form while playing for the England team, he became the target of barely veiled racist commentary which charged him with disloyalty, unreliability, and even laziness. During the course of the finals, his place in the expectations of many soccer fans was easily taken by a white boy, relatively new to the team, Paul Gascoigne.

David R. Shumway

Rock & Roll as a Cultural Practice

When thinking about rock or "pop" music what is in question is not simply a well-established corpus of records, performances, groups or images. Unlike television, film or arguably theater, the forms of this music irreducibly involve an intersecting range of practices, without an obviously assured primary discourse or text. To take the gramophone disc as the "text" of rock music is to marginalize or dismiss a wide range of activities (such as domestic improvisation, or live performances by pub or club bands) which never accede to reproduction by way of the recording process; it is also to neglect the way in which rock's musical forms have importantly diffused through a variety of technical means other than gramophone recording-"live" performance itself, cassettes, television and film soundtrack, currently "promotional" videos. -Alan Durant, Conditions of Music

Rock & roll is elusive. It doesn't easily fit the models that we have for cultural objects. For example, there is no definition of rock & roll as a musical genre upon which most critics would agree. l To call something

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rock & roll is to distinguish it from other forms such as jazz, classical, or country, but to attribute nothing very definite to it. More significant, however, it is unclear just what an individual instance of rock & roll is, since neither records nor lyrics nor written music can be regarded as primary. There is no text in this genre. Or at least there is no text of the same order as a poem or a novel, which is to say that rock texts are elusive in more ways than those that poststructuralism has claimed for texts in general. Rock lyrics are no more or less unstable than other kinds of language. Rather, rock & roll as a discursive practice cannot be identified with anyone of its many codes or products. We need a new way to conceive of the kind of cultural formation that rock & roll has become, since to call it music is to repress or neglect the other elements in which rock & roll is articulated. Most people probably continue to think of rock & roll as a musical genre. While this popular conception requires no explicit definition, some critics have tried to give it one by resorting to a periodization of rock history.2 By reserving the name "rock & roll" for music featuring the combination of rhythm & blues and country & western that emerged in the 1950S, these critics assert an original and genuine form of music. In naming the dominant music of the 1960s "rock," they identify another period and in the process distinguish what must inevitably appear as a lesser genre, diluted or bastardized in its relation to the original. But aside from writing these critics' tastes into history, such periodization relies on a monolithic conception, which is nonetheless only vaguely specified, of 1950S rock & roll. Not only does the mixing of two previous genres tell us too little, but it also describes only a handful of significant 1950S rockers: preeminently Elvis, but not, for example, Little Richard or Chuck Berry. The point is that rock & roll has always been a hodgepodge, and the music of the 1960s represents only a wider diversity of raw materials. Most important, the rock & roll/rock periodization represses the continuity of practices that has existed from the 1950S until today. The various activities associated with rock in the 1960s and later-radio programming, concerts, dances, festivals, etc.-all are impossible without the break in American popular culture that the emergence of rock & roll represents. The Woodstock festival itself is best considered an

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instance of rock & roll, and, therefore, all of the music performed at the festival, regardless of its formal diversity, is properly identified as rock & roll. But if rock & roll is not a musical genre, what is it? My solution to this problem is to think of rock & roll as a historically specific cultural practice. Rock & roll is not the only form that could be described this way. Jazz, classical, country, and musical comedy could all be understood as cultural practices, and the rise of the recording industry has changed each of them. Classical critics may still claim that recordings recall the memory of live performances, but, to most listeners, the recording has become the most common experience of classical music. Jazz and country music have undergone a much greater transformation than classical as the result of recording, but both remain more rooted than rock in music that preceded recording. When F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the 1920S the "jazz age," he almost certainly did not have recorded music in mind, but then he had more than just music in mind. He understood jazz as a cultural practice. Like "rock & roll," the name "jazz" conflates music, dancing, and sex. Jazz meant not just a certain musical form, but the speakeasies where it was performed and the manners that went with them. Jazz as a cultural practice of the 1920S was largely dead by the 1930S, however, and the music in a certain sense followed suit. Jazz as a popular medium came to be adapted to the dominant tradition in Western music. By the 1930S, jazz was being performed by "orchestras" or big bands using music written or "arranged" in advance and principles any classically trained musician could comprehend. Rock & roll had a different trajectory because it emerged in the context of the explosion of electronic media of the 1950S. Like jazz, rock's antecedents were folk forms, but they were transmuted in an entirely different way. Instead of being progressively tamed and assimilated, rock & roll took on a life of its own, not just as youth music, but as a way of life that youth lived, and, more important, were represented as living. Rock developed as it did not because of its special musical properties, but because of the conjuncture of particular social conditions and technological developments. As has often been asserted, the youth culture of the 1950S and later could not have happened without teenagers having become a significant market-

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that is, without their having significant disposable funds. Having that money and an increased independence from family, teenagers began to identify themselves as a group, and they sought models by which to understand themselves as such. The media provided those models, which included the juvenile delinquent as "news" and as portrayed by James Dean and Marlon Brando in the movies. Businesses of all sorts were more than willing to provide the commodities teens would use to differentiate themselves from others. Rock & roll records were one of these commodities, along with blue jeans and motorcycle jackets. But rock & roll combined these two structures of identity. Stars were both models and objects to be possessed and fetishized: millions of dollars of Elvis paraphernalia were sold in 1956 alone. 3 In addition to cheaper, better recordings, television and films also disseminated rock & roll on a scale that far exceeded the jazz of Fitzgerald's era. Over four hundred rock & roll films were made between 1955 and 19 86 .4 As a cultural practice rock & roll includes, then, not just music, but the other forms and behavior associated with it; it also includes both performers and listeners. But it would be a mistake to reverse the usual hierarchy and simply substitute subjects for objects. Lawrence Grossberg acknowledges the elusiveness of the object when he asserts that "without claiming that the actual construction and sound of the songs are unimportant ... one needs to argue that they cannot be directly interpreted to explain the effects of the music." His solution is to resort to the self-understanding of rock listeners ("the structure of their responses") in order to get at the music's meaning and function. s Such a strategy assumes that subjects, rather than having effects produced in them by a determining object, have consciousness of and control over the object. In treating rock & roll as a discursive practice, I mean to refuse the model that would give us this choice of object or subject. Rock is both a sign system-or perhaps an ensemble of such systems-and a practice: a form of semiosis and an activity in which performers and listeners engage. From the perspective of discursive practice, one does not ask questions about the "effects" of rock & roll on its audience, or of the way the audience understands its own experience of the form. Both questions assume a SUbject/object opposition, and they tend to lead to giving one side

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of that opposition dominance. To think simply of rock as having certain effects renders its audience mere objects, while to focus on the experience(s) of members of the audience or the "uses" to which they put the music is to remove them from discourse entirely. No discourse has mechanical effects, but no subject ever escapes discourse. To speak of performers and listeners practicing rock & roll avoids either implication.

The cultural practice of rock & roll entails more products and activities than can even be surveyed in so brief a space as this. Rather than attempt such a survey, I want to look at some examples of the nonmusical registers in which rock & roll is expressed, particularly the performers themselves, those who produce and are produced by rock & roll. In the first place, it must be admitted that rock is not unique in its lack of a primary text or its combination of discourses. On the contrary, in many respects it recalls the way music was produced prior to the emergence of "classical music" as a secular form. The musical concert, for example, developed out of the prior use of musicians to accompany theatrical performances. 6 And even today, rock is hardly the only cultural form to combine several sign systems or discourses. Alan Durant, in the passage quoted as an epigraph for this essay, may overstate the case for the uniqueness of rock & roll. Film is precisely an instance of the combination of discourses, even if individual films are finally the primary texts. On the other hand, textual primacy in music and other performing arts has always been questionable, and it became radically more so with the advent of recordings which added a third "text" to those of score and performance. In general, classical music is most identified with the score, music represented by a visual sign system and the work of an individual composer. That representation works as a norm or essence in terms of which any particular performance can be judged, and it functions as a stable object for critical and scholarly study. Performances obviously involve some degree of variation, but in general the performer is understood as serving the work, perhaps even serving as a medium for the genius of the composer. This stance is reflected in the highly

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conventionalized manner in which classical music is presented. The concert implies not only a single spatial relationship between audience and performers, but even the dress and behavior of each group, both of which reflect reverence for the object being presented. The most significant variation among performances thus becomes the virtuosity of the musicians. While such a quality must be vague to function as a general aesthetic category, it implies mastery of the music and expression of a unique ability, both of which reflect a tension between performer and composer. While virtuosos must master the music-be in control of it so as to be able to give it their own interpretation-they must also be mastered by it or risk appearing not to play the score correctly. While an individual style is necessary, the composer's "intentions" must also be expressed by the performer. But not all forms usually understood to belong to the classical are the same. Perhaps the most interesting example for my purposes is opera. Polymorphously discursive, opera exists at one extreme of the formation that we call classical music, while at the other extreme are those compositional styles and techniques of presentation that tend toward mathematics and the disappearance of the performer. In no other genre is virtuosity so valued as it is in opera singing. Opera diverges, however, in many other respects from what is typical of the classical formation. Rock & roll, of course, differs in many respects from classical music as a cultural practice: it does not, for example, value virtuosity. Although certain factions of the audience during the early 1970S did value virtuoso guitar in bands such as the Allman Brothers, the Grateful Dead, and the various Eric Clapton vehicles, this was an oddity in rock history. During most of its existence, rock & roll has been distinctly anti-virtuosic. Even in heavy metal, where guitar mastery is an important element, the technical ability of the player is not the focus. Nor is it even in the blues, although a stronger case could be made there. Unlike the concert soloist, the guitar playing of rock performers is only one aspect of their performance. Rock performers are never merely musicians. They are to a greater or lesser extent also actors playing characters they have invented. Rock audiences do not come to appreciate nor merely to listen to the music being performed; they come to participate in an event and to establish some

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kind of relationship with those characters. That is why rock audiences usually sing along, shout, whistle, stomp, and clap, regarding it as much their right to be heard as the performer's. Virtuosity aside, however, rock & roll and opera have much in common. This statement may seem shocking at first, especially since rock & roll and opera seem to have nothing in common musically. Some rock & roll-art rock, such as that produced by the Moody Blues or Emerson, Lake and Palmer by explicit allusion, and music by the Who or Bruce Springsteen-does share some musical properties with opera, but that is not the point of my comparison. Rather, the central similarity between rock & roll and opera is that both are practices which are most often identified as music, but which are not purely musical: they communicate through a variety of different sign systems of which music is only one. Both rock and opera are heavily dependent upon lyrics, but they also entail narrative, as well as the costumes, staging, acting, and other elements of theatrical performance. Other similarities between rock and opera reside in the cultural role each has taken on: in the way, for example, each tends to make stars of its performers, something rare in the instrumental side of classical music. Luciano Pavarotti has his share of passionate "groupies" who will press up against the stage with a fevered excitement we've come to expect from the rock & roll fan, but not from the middle-aged woman in pearls and high heels. In the nineteenth century opera was a form of popular culture that engaged strong passions and produced deep loyalties that occasionally resulted in riots over performances; sometimes opera was explicitly identified with radical politics, just as rock was in the 1960s. In noting these similarities, I am not attempting to raise the prestige of a mass form by depicting it in the reflected glow of an elite one, but rather, to shift metaphors, to compare two cultural practices that are both "impure" forms. As much as one could claim that rock & roll aspires to the condition of opera-and it has done so explicitly in Tommy-one could also assert that contemporary opera staging and performance aspire to the condition of rock video. But I want to say more than merely that rock & roll is an impure musical form; it is not even mainly a musical form. One strong piece of evidence for this has been the conspicuous failure of rock criti-

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cism to develop even the most rudimentary musicological discourse. In its place there is a rough but ready-to-hand taxonomy of styles, including soul, funk, punk, and heavy metal. In general, these styles carry conventional meanings that are rarely questioned, and they are defined as much by extramusical features as musical ones. Of these extramusical features, we might begin with lyrics, which can be regarded as a defining feature of rock & roll (purely instrumental performers, such as the Ventures, being mere curiosities). Yet in spite of the ubiquity of lyrics and the fact that they do seem to receive the lion's share of attention in most rock criticism, it has long been a widely shared aesthetic principle that lyrics are not the most significant aspect of the genre. Records such as R.E.M.'s Murmur were praised because most of the lyrics could not be understood. Sociological studies have claimed to show that rock lyrics are routinely ignored by many listeners. Rock & roll lyrics may function mainly as "music," just as scat singing does in jazz, or as foreign-language lyrics do in the experience of opera either on stage or record. In the United States, opera is almost exclusively sung in languages that the majority of the audience does not understand. Furthermore, when opera is sung in English, people routinely complain that they cannot understand the lyrics anyway. But neither in opera nor in rock & roll are the lyrics merely an expression of music. In each case they contribute to the meaning of the performance even if their meanings are not immediately understood. Even if the listener does not know what the words "Celeste Aida" mean when the tenor sings them, the opera Aida is still understood as a narrative. Similarly, while most listeners to "Radio Free Europe" haven't any idea what the song is about, they have already come to understand the meaning of R.E.M. as distinct from all other bands and performers of rock & roll. An opera has a clearly distinguishable primary "text," the libretto and score, even though it includes both verbal and musical "discourses." This text can be interpreted in performance by different companies, but it can also be interpreted by critics apart from any particular performance. When Durant argues of rock that it has "no single primary discourse or text," he points out that to take the record as the primary "text" is to "neglect the way in which rock's musi-

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cal forms have importantly diffused through a variety of technical means," including concerts, films, and videos.? Opera may be reproduced in any of these media, but it continues to be identified as what the composer and librettist wrote. Rock & roll on film or video is not merely reproduced, but translated. If the video presents a narrative, for example, it is seldom a narrative the song actually tells. There are "rock & roll films," any number of American International pictures, for example, where the presence of the music is much less significant than the teenage subject matter. Blackboard ]unyle contained only one rock song, Bill Haley and the Comets' "Rock around the Clock," but the film helped to define the culture's conception of dangerous youth and to make rock & roll a part of that definition. This conception, and the attitudes and behaviors that illustrate it, do as much to define rock & roll as a distinct cultural practice as any musical elements or products. Technologies such as film, television, and video have usually been regarded as marginal to or merely supportive of the rock performer's work as a maker of records. Grossberg describes them as mere "apparatus" for the music. 8 But the career of the King of rock & roll himself throws this conception into doubt. Elvis Presley is usually assumed to have embodied, if not produced, the beginning of rock & roll when he made a recording at Sam Phillips's studio to give to his mother. In this and his subsequent recordings for Phillips's Sun Records, Elvis brought together the formal elements that have most often been taken to define rock & roll music. The regional popularity of these records led RCA to sign Elvis to a contract that would allow national distribution. But Elvis first reached a national audience on television, and a strong case can be made that the visual aspects of these performances were as significant in defining rock & roll as were the formal features of his music. What was most remarkable about Elvis on television was the dancing or gyrating that he did while he performed. His first TV appearances, on the Dorsey Brothers' Show, included some of his dancing, but, perhaps because the shows were seen by relatively small audiences or because Elvis's dancing was photographed from above, these appearances produced no significant reaction. In his first appearance on the Milton Berle Show, however, Elvis's dancing was both more

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extreme and went on not only during the instrumental break but during the entire last half of the performance of "Hound Dog." The reaction of both professional critics and of self-appointed guardians of morality was swift and harsh. The public outcry nearly caused NBC to cancel Elvis's next scheduled TV appearance, on the Steve Allen Show. Rather than cancel the show, the network devised a plan to contain Elvis. Allen dressed him up in tails and had him sing "Hound Dog" to a live basset hound. Later in the same year, Elvis was restrained by court order from making any offensive gyrations on stage in Jacksonville, Florida. Early in 1957, in what was Elvis's third appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, Sullivan insisted that Elvis be photographed only from the waist Up.9 Why did Elvis's dancing cause such outcry? In the history of mass culture, Elvis is the first male star to display his body as an overt sexual object. While most male movie stars have doubtless been portrayed as sexually desirable, their bodies have not been the locus of the attraction. Rudolph Valentino and James Dean were exceptions to this rule and precursors of Elvis, their bodies being displayed at moments in their films as "adored objects," the actors themselves becoming objects of worship by cults of (mostly female) fans. lO But movie narratives and editing presented Valentino and Dean as active subjects from whose point of view the audience experienced the story, while Elvis as a singer and dancer was a more passive object of the audience's gaze. Contemporary commentators made it clear that it was his overt sexuality that shocked them, and they hinted at their awareness that it was also a violation of gender codes. Elvis's performance was discussed in terms usually applied to striptease: "bumping and grinding." By the time of the Berle Show performance, he had already been given the nickname "the pelvis," a name which, of course, means what it doesn't say. But because I want to differentiate Elvis from later male stars, I want to insist that the phallus is not fetishized in Elvis's dancing. Elvis's costume, which always included a jacket, hid, rather than displayed, his genitals. Elvis's motions imitate intercourse, and his performance should be read as a public display of "sex." Elvis thus put the "sex," which the name rock & roll described, explicitly into his performance. But in calling attention to himself as sexual-that is, in presenting himself as an object of

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sexual incitement or excitation-he violated not just conventional morality but more importantly the taboo against male sexual display. In violating this taboo, Elvis became, like most women but unlike most men, sexualized. As Frigga Haug and her collaborators have illustrated, women are routinely sexualized as the result of their socialization under patriarchy. Various parts of women's bodieshair, legs, breasts-become loci of sexualization; women's fashion always calls attention to these features that are presented for the male gaze, and thus mark the woman as a sexual object. ll The transvestism of later rock stars may be read as their taking on the markers of the sexualized gender. The television and newsreel photographs of Elvis introduce another dimension of his sexualization. According to one narrative, Elvis made his "pelvic gyrations" a regular part of his act after girls screamed and applauded in the small southern clubs and schools where he played before he became a national act. Photos of one of these early performances already show young women in various states of rapture watching Elvis perform. 12 When Elvis is featured on major national TV programs, the audience becomes part of the show. In the Berle performance, the film cuts between shots of Elvis and shots of the audience, not as a large mass of indistinguishable faces, but of particular faces whose response tells us of the excitement the performer is generating. But this editing also reinforces Elvis as the object of the gaze. It is not just an audience, of which each viewer is a member, that is watching Elvis; television or newsreel viewers experience Elvis as the object of the gaze of the (almost exclusively female) individuals who scream, faint, and otherwise enact ecstasy. This representation of Elvis is formally equivalent to the shot/reverse shot editing that structures the gaze in narrative cinema. It becomes a standard trope of the representation of rock, and will be repeated numerous times during the British invasion of the 1960s. These pictures showed other fans how to respond appropriately to rock acts, while at the same time they created a new representation of male sexuality. During the 1950S the representation of rock & roll on television might have been the way that the practice was visually experienced by most of its adherents. During the 1960s, however, the rock con-

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cert became television's rival. The current form of the rock concert became "routinized" in the 1970S under the influence of Frank Barsalona, a promoter who wanted to assure attendance by " 'guaranteeing' a good night out." 13 The concert as a form had long been standardized by classical and pop predecessors of rock & roll, but rock concert performances also derive from a nonconcert tradition, the performance in clubs by jazz and r&b musicians. The audience plays a distinctly different role in each of these forms. In the (nonoperatic) classical concert, the audience is passive and focused on the stage; in a club, the musicians mayor may not be the center of the audience's attention. This decentering of the musicians increases the audience's role in the event. Not only do patrons typically dance, but they usually eat, drink, and talk during the performance. Rock concert patrons display both concert and club behavior and have added some of their own. On the other hand, the theatrical elements of the concert, reduced to the barest minimum in classical performances, are considerably revived in rock concerts. One could argue that rock & roll is fundamentally a theatrical medium and that its characteristic forms of presentation imply a hidden narrative structure. If this assertion holds, music videos can then be understood not as promotional devices essentially extraneous to rock & roll, but as a logical development of the aesthetic character of the form. Classical musicians, even soloists, do not attempt to stand out in front of their music. Violinists or pianists known for their emotionally demonstrative playing are quite subtle by rock standards. One might argue that the main thing we expect of rock artists on stage is that they emote. Such emotion is displayed only partly through vocalization; just as important are facial expressions, which, even though they get lost in big halls and stadia, are often magnified in video displays or concert films. Bodily gestures and dancing have clearly long been a part of rock performances; more· recently, elaborately choreographed videos have led audiences to expect the same on stage. The well-known result has been that some performers have chosen to lipsynch to recorded music so as to be able to perform elaborate dances and movements. With a performance such as Madonna's recent "Blond Ambition" show, it is hard to know whether one is dealing with a concert at all and not theater pure and simple. But not

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all rockers perform theatrically. At the other extreme, bands like the Grateful Dead just stand there and play. But a Dead show is something else entirely from a classical concert. Relying on the audience's familiarity with their music, the Dead achieve, or at least give the impression of achieving, a much more subtle form of communication. In fact, Dead concerts seem less like shows than rituals, including a standard repertory of music, a community of devoted followers, and even a pacing that strikes one as liturgical. In analyzing several of the registers or codes that make up the practice of rock & roll, we are, I think, led to treat performers as texts, perhaps even the primary texts of the form. But by suggesting that performers might be the most important of the many objects produced by rock & roll, I do not mean to advance an auteur theory. In one sense, such a theory is unnecessary because rock stars since Elvis have always had auteur status regardless of who writes their songs. In another place, I have suggested that bands or individual performers be thought of as "performing units" as a way to call attention to their artificiality-that is, to the distinction between actual individuals such as Mick Jagger or Bill Wyman and the roles they play in the Rolling Stones. 14 What makes performing units different from artists is that the former are represented by a great variety of products, their involvement in the production of which varies widely. A band or singer is identified not just with particular recordings, but with music and lyrics, album covers, dress, films, videos, performing style, and concert staging. And whatever the involvement of the performer in producing these objects and behaviors, they remain as much collaborative productions as are feature films. To make a record or mount a tour, a performer typically needs a veritable army of collaborators, including producers, session musicians, promoters, and roadies. Since the performer is what gets represented on record and on stage, the performing unit is as much what is produced as any of the signs or products with which it is associated. Consider the Monkees, a group created by the entertainment industry as the subjects of a situation comedy, who made a number of successful singles in the 1960s and in whose records there was a revival of interest in the late 1980s. The point is not merely that it is possible to invent a rock band out of whole cloth and market it like soap or

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automobiles, but that it was done with so little resistance. The Monkees were not all that different from most other new rock bands that the entertainment industry tried to sell, except that they had their own television program, a sales opportunity no other new band has enjoyed. But the acceptance of their records suggests that the audience was not put off by the knowledge that the band consisted of actors playing musicians, perhaps because the audience already comprehended rock stars as actors of a sort. Nevertheless, the Monkees succeeded only because a sense of authenticity was manufactured for them, not only-and paradoxically-by means of fictional lives their television show gave them, but also by the usual methods: interviews and biographies presented in fan magazines and other media. Thus the Monkees came to seem to be playing themselves. If the term "performing unit" seems awkward, if not silly, it is precisely because rock & roll assumes the fiction that its stars are who they appear to be. We do not take John Lennon or Bob Dylan to be playing a role. We don't take a classical soloist to be playing a role either, but we also don't read much personality in his performance. We may perceive opera stars' personalities in all of the roles they play, but a rock star like Mick Jagger always plays Mick Jagger even when he acts another role in a narrative film. "Lennon," "Dylan," and "Jagger," however, are roles that, unlike those in opera or film, exist in no libretto or script. Rock stars do not transform or animate the creation of another; they make themselves up as they go along. Yet these roles are not as original as they may at first seem. Even the most individualized and personally expressive performers are at best collaborators in their own creation. Dylan, for example, asks us to believe that styles of music as diverse as folk, rock, country, and gospel are all genuine instances of self-expression. Along with these styles, Dylan has assumed a series of personae, different social roles. He is perhaps best-known as the prophet of such diverse messages as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "You Gotta Serve Somebody,'" but he has also played the aesthete (Hiahway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde), the down-home balladeer (John Wesley Hardina and Nashville Skyline) and the confessional poet (Blood on the Tracks). Each of these new roles that Dylan has taken up has been written in advance, not with the goal of marketing Bob Dylan, but as part of a preexisting

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cultural system. Thus Dylan's initial role as folksinger was a conscious imitation of Woody Guthrie, which was clearly marked when Robert Zimmerman renamed himself Bob Dylan. ls Similarly, Mick Jagger's much more consistent persona derives from the blues tradition, and perhaps most directly from Robert Johnson-not, of course, the real one, but the legendary Robert Johnson who was supposed to have made a pact with the devil. Whatever we call rock performers and however much we insist on their constructedness, we cannot get away from the problem of authenticity. To understand this point is to see the flaw in the oftenarticulated position that the singer-songwriters of the 1970S (like James Taylor or Joni Mitchell) represent in their claim to individual expression a deviation from genuine rock & roll. In fact, the most successful rock stars had always been presented as "real people." The illusion that we could know the real Elvis, McCartney, or even the real Monkees was fostered by such superficial means as fan magazine interviews or facts on the back of bubble-gum cards, but it was also implicit in Elvis's insistence on his own style of recording the songs of others, and explicit in those performers who wrote their own songs. The appearance of artistic authenticity distinguishes rock & roll from Tin-Pan-Alley-style pop music which exhibits no desire to conceal its own craft and thus comes off as obviously constructed. Rock conceals its constructedness. Performers such as Springsteen and Dylan are often contrasted with David Bowie and others who call attention to rock as a set of conventions rather than claim authentic self-expression. According to Simon Frith, Springsteen is a "rock naturalist," his music aiming at the appearance of natural expression. Elsewhere Frith shows in some detail how Springsteen's authenticity is constructed, how Springsteen plays in his professional life a person he is not in real life. 16 But it's not clear to me that Bowie or others who emphasize the fictionality of their roles ever fail to make claims to authenticity. Authenticity is not dispensed with just because a performance is not understood as self-expression. The different roles Bowie has adopted call attention to the fact of his performance or his playing those roles, but they do nothing to diminish, and they may in fact heighten, the sense that there is a real Bowie behind them. Bryan Ferry's insincerity, his patent

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artificiality define him just as much as Dylan's advertised sincerity. The fact is that performers are constructs whether they lay claim to natural or conventional expression, but claiming convention does not dispense with the expectation of authenticity. The performer who exposes convention claims to be the more real because he does so. To treat performers as the primary texts of rock & roll is not to stabilize rock meanings by reference to the intentions of singers, songwriters, or musicians. It is rather to suggest that the various codes and media in which rock & roll finds expression all contribute to the production of the performer. While a record, a video, or a film may rely on only some of these elements, the performing unit is finally the result of all of them. And yet even this text should not be allowed a simple primacy or centrality. For while the audience of a performing unit doubtless contributes to its production, we also need to consider how the audience is positioned by various performances, as well as how it practices rock & roll in general. Treating performers as texts is a useful strategy for dealing with an obscure object of intellectual desire. We should be careful not to imagine that we have captured that object. In that spirit, it must be added that treating rock & roll as a cultural practice is not a means to an exhaustive or total understanding of the phenomenon. We should not be tempted to reify a useful analytic tool and thereby make it into an actual, unified object existing autonomously, out there. Even considered as a cultural practice, rock & roll is still a group of related but often contradictory products, activities, styles, and forms. Notes I

2

3 4

5

6 7

Alan Durant, Conditions of Music (Albany, 1984), 167. Dave Marsh, Born to Run: The Sprinasteen Story (Garden City, N. Y., 1979). Alan and Susan Raymond (producers), Elvis '56 (Media Home Entertainment, Los Angeles, 1987). Linda J. Sandahl, Rock Films: A Viewer's Guide to Three Decades of Musicals, Concerts, Documentaries and Soundtracks, 1955-1986 (New York, 19 87). Lawrence Grossberg, "Teaching the Popular," in Theory in the Classroom, ed. Cary Nelson (Urbana, 1986), 181, 189. Durant, Conditions of Music, 9. Ibid., 169, 168.

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9 10

II

12 13 14

15 16

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Grossberg, "Teaching the Popular," 190. Alan and Susan Raymond, producers, Elvis '56. Jon Savage, "The Enemy Within: Sex, Rock, and Identity," in FacinB the Music, ed. Simon Frith (New York, 1988), 131-72; and Miriam Hansen, "Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship," Cinema Journal 25 (Summer 1986): 6-32. Frigga Haug et al., Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Memory, trans. Erica Carter (London, 1987). Alan and Susan Raymond, producers, Elvis '56. Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock 'n' Roll (New York, 1981), 136-37. David R. Shumway, "Reading Rock'n'Roll in the Classroom: A Critical Pedagogy," in Critical PedaB08Y, the State, and Cultural StruBBle, ed. Henry A. Giroux and Peter McClaren (Albany, 1989), 231-32. Ibid., 232-34. Simon Frith, Music for Pleasure (New York, 1988), 94-101.

Robert B. Ray

Tracking

lite Tin Pan Alley songs that have become what we know as "standards" typically derived from a specific songwriting process: the composer, responsible for the music, settled first on a melody and second on a harmonic accompaniment, consisting at this stage of usually no more than instructions regarding the chords that would inflect the vocal line in a particular way. The lyricist, presented with the completed music, would then set words to it, and the result would be something like "My Romance" (Rogers and Hart), "Someone to Watch over Me" (George and Ira Gershwin), or "Stardust" (Hoagy Carmichael and Mitchell Parish). Occasionally, of course, these jobs might be performed by the same person: George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter wrote their own lyrics, although Berlin relied on professional harmonizers to write down chord progressions he could only hear. At times, the order of this process was reversed: while Larry Hart always required Richard Rogers's music to get started, Oscar Hammerstein preferred going first, writing

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lyrics (to a dummy melody's scansion) that Rogers would subsequently orchestrate. In general, however, the standard pattern became the norm, persisting into the rock & roll era. Lieber and Stoller, Goffin and King, and even Jagger and Richards worked in this way, and in doing so, they confirmed the traditional definitions of "the song" and "songwriting." The metaphysics of this method have become obvious only in retrospect: the division of labor, the priority of music over words, the telos of an AABA song-these aspects of traditional songwriting issue from a culture whose worldview Derrida has labeled "logocentric." I Recently, however, new ways of writing songs have begun to challenge the standard procedure. For both Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints, Paul Simon built songs up from rhythm tracks-some found, others recorded with no particular song, or even kind of song, in mind. "I waited for the melodies and words to emerge from the tracks," Simon has said about The Rhythm of the Saints, but this emergence, unaided by teleology, often had to proceed by trial and error. 2 Having recorded one unaccompanied drum track, Simon worked to "find" a song by trying out genres (New Orleans rhythm & blues, gospel) before settling on dOo-wop for what became "The Obvious Child." Rap composing, of course, is the prototype for this songwriting procedure. Concentrating on rhythm (to the extent of eliminating the vocal melody line), working almost entirely with found music (sampled and recontextualized into new combinations), rap, in one writer's words, "is the scavenger of the music business."3 In another sense, it represents the pop analogue to a similar activity, one that also turns on knowledge of a tradition which can be reactivated by quotation for new purposes: scholarship. With his 19,ooo-record collection, Akai S900 sampler, and Ensoniq EPS sequencer (tools for effecting infinite recombinations), Public Enemy's Hank Shocklee seems less like the aural "shoplifter"4 he has been compared to than the specialist scholar whose impulses, Walter Benjamin observed, lie proximate to those of the collector. s As Susan Buck-Morss points out, the collector represented for Benjamin someone "who assembles things that have been set out of circulation and are meaningless as use values," an apt description of rap composition.6 Think, for example, of the backing track to De La Soul's "Eye Know," an aural montage of

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fragments, including the whistling from Otis Redding's "Dock of the Bay" and a horn phrase from Steely Dan's "Peg." For Benjamin, the scholar and collector resembled still another type that he called "the ponderer," "the man who already had the resolution to great problems, but has forgotten them.... The thinking of the ponderer stands therefore in the sign of remembering": The memory of the ponderer holds sway over the disordered mass of dead knowledge. Human knowledge is piecework to it in a particularly pregnant sense: namely as the heaping up of arbitrarily cut up pieces, out of which one puts together a puzzle.... The allegoricist reaches now here, now there, into the chaotic depths that his knowledge places at his disposal, grabs an item out, holds it next to another, and sees whether they fit: that meaning to this image, or this image to that meaning. The result never lets itself be predicted; for there is no natural mediation between the two.?

The result never lets itself be predicted-in this element of surprise lies the great advantage of the ponderer's method. Indeed, the terms of Benjamin's description anticipate communication theory, with its redefinition of information as precisely a function of unpredictability.8 By this account, then, the initial difficulty of Public Enemy's records issued from the "informational density" of aural collages like "Fight the Power," with its seventeen different samples in the first ten seconds. This move is not without risks: it increases information by minimizing the redundancy on which easy reception depends. It wins its bet when it tells us something new. Scholarship, collecting, pondering, information theory-these activities may seem heady company for rap songwriting. Benjamin, however, has taught us to detect the similarities between occupations normally regarded as unrelated, and having done so, we might begin to see in contemporary songwriting suggestions for a new writing practice. What if academics were to write essays the way Paul Simon now composes songs? Given the predictability of so much contemporary criticism, this question seems worth taking Up.9 Hence the form of this essay. I decided to begin with "sampling," building up individual tracks (the essay's rhythm?) by appropriating familiar infor-

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mation, while keeping open the purpose to which it might ultimately be put. I hope that as in rap, while the contents of the individual tracks may sometimes sound familiar, the final mix may be less so. This essay is composed of six different tracks (two more than the Beatles had at their disposal), conceived at different occasions (as recorded parts might be), and brought together only in the final mix, which you are reading. Just as any modern mixing board allows you to "solo" any given track (to hear it alone, isolated from the others), and just as such soloing is typically the first step in mixing, I will begin here by running down the contents of my individual tracks, so that you can see (or hear) the parts before they dissolve into the blend.

Track One. During the past two years, a group at the University of Florida has participated in something called the Institute for European and Comparative Studies (recently renamed the Florida Research Ensemble, to suggest our interest in music and collaborative work), one of many such institutes whose cropping up suggests the increasingly widespread desire for interdisciplinary approaches to subjects perhaps not comprehended by traditional departmentssubjects, for example, like rock & roll. Our institute organized itself around a single topic, the orality/literacy opposition described by Walter Ong, Jack Goody, Jacques Derrida, and others. What has interested us is the notion of writing as a technolo8Y whose advent and development have dramatically altered human consciousness. As both Ong and Goody demonstrate, a person surrounded by writing thinks differently from someone without it, and he will do so even if he himself cannot write. lO Abstract definitions, critical analysis, particular logics of ordering-these things that we take for granted in fact depend on the presence of writing and its various apparati: lists, indexes, alphabetization, charts, paragraphs. Without writing, the kind of thinking dependent on those categories does not exist. Here is an example, first described by A. R. Luria, and summarized by Ong: given a set of drawings of four objects (a hammer, a saw, a log, and a hatchet), subjects were asked to point to the one dissimilar from the rest. While literate subjects will inevitably exclude log, the

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one item not a tool, illiterate subjects see the problem differently, not in terms of abstract categories, but in terms of practical situations involving use. As Ong observes: "If you are a workman with tools and see a log, you think of applying the tool to it, not of keeping the tool away from what it was made for-in some weird intellectual game." Thus, one peasant replies: "They're all alike. The saw will saw the log and the hatchet will chop it into small pieces. If one of these has to go, I'd throw out the hatchet. It doesn't do as good a job as a saw." Told that the hammer, saw, and hatchet are all tools, he discounts the categorical class and persists in situational thinking: "Yes, but even if we have tools, we still need wood-otherwise we can't build anything." II Even more important than this example is Ong's conclusion that were he living in a fully alphabetic culture, the peasant would respond differently, would understand the concept of "tool"-and would do so even if he himself did not read or write. For my purposes here, I don't intend to develop further the orality/literacy distinction, except to point out the obvious parallel to performance/recording, and to suggest that like writing, recording changes consciousness, and that people surrounded by records will develop different attitudes toward music, and will do so even if they do not know how to make records themselves. I2

Track Two. The debates over sampling have called attention to the rapid development in recording technology and the attendant reconceptualization of the recording process. Recording itself has been possible only since 1877, when Edison invented it; writing, of course, is much older, invented by the Sumerians around 3500 B.C. As Ong reminds us, almost everything we take for granted about writing took centuries to arrive: the alphabet itself, for example, appeared 2,000 years after the Sumerians' script, and paper was first manufactured in Europe only in the twelfth century. Other familiar uses of writing, Ong points out, arise still later, like the personal diary, which remained virtually unknown until the seventeenth century.

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Recording, by contrast, almost certainly because of writing's existence, has developed more quickly. Nevertheless, most of the major changes have occurred in the last twenty-five years. Before the mid1960s, most engineers and producers, especially those working with jazz and classical artists, regarded their job as capturing a live sound, as simply recording (reproducing) the sound the musicians made while playing together in a room built for its ideal acoustic properties. Again and again, we hear producers such as John Hammond lamenting the difficulties of catching something like the sound of the 1930S Count Basie Band in full flight. In the 1960s, Glenn Gould scandalized the classical community by openly acknowledging that his recorded performances consisted of multiple takes joined by inaudible splices. The Beatles made such things famous, with "Strawberry Fields" resulting from two takes, played at different tempos and in different keys, spliced together and matched by speeding up one and slowing down the other. Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge over Troubled Water" made the punch-in respectable with the revelation that Garfunkel's vocal had been pieced together from dozens of takes, often of a single word or phrase. In the 1980s, these procedures began to seem primitive. For those musicians still playing in studios (many had been replaced by drum machines and synthesizers), the punch-in (or "drop") became so routine that songs were rarely played all the way through. Recording came more and more to resemble cinematic acting, as mixing (the analogue to editing) constructed a performance out of fragments often played on different days (and even in different places: the phenomenon known as "flying in" a part became standard, whereby a musician is sent a multitrack take, to which he adds his part before returning it).13 And then the explosion of computer-aided recording: MIDI (musical instrument digital interface, the linking together of multiple instruments through a digital signal), sequencing, sampling. The effect of this technology has been increasingly to remove recording from performance, to create sounds that cannot be readily reproduced in live situations. In semiotic terms, a record, like a movie, has become a sign without a referent: behind Casablanca or "Fight the Power" lies no single, "real" event which has been transcribed and reproduced. Instead, there are only fragments of behavior, snatches

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of sound: a turn of the head filmed one Monday for a sequence completed a month later, a drum beat sampled for mixing with a radio announcement. In 1967, situationist leader Guy Debord warned that in "societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation." 14 For film and music, we can amend this last sentence: "Everything that was directly performed has moved away into a construction, a recording composed of performance's surviving fragments.

Track Three. It would have been surprising if these developments in recording had not begun to affect live performances. If, as Ong points out, the existence of writing modifies the way we speak, we would expect that the existence of recorded music would affect the way people play. And of course it does. From the start, jazz musicians played differently for having heard Louis Armstrong's records. ls But I have in mind here less records' influence on musical styles than their impact on protocols of performing, an influence which begins with the rise of the microphone, first for singers (replacing the megaphone, used anachronistically by Rudy Vallee), then for orchestral or band sections too quiet to compete with louder instruments. The microphone's redefinition of popular singing, immediately audible in the shift from Jolson's stentorian bravura to Crosby's quiet intimacy, is the first dramatic result of performance's admission of recording technology. This development flourished in rock, first with the spread of the electric guitar and bass, then with sound reinforcement systems (P.A.'s), which by the late 1970S had spawned electronic drums, triggered by hitting the acoustic set. Inevitably, this "contamination" of the live by the recorded has resulted in the actual replacement of the live, as Madonna, Janet Jackson, New Order, Milli Vanilli, and almost every rap group perform to taped music and/or lip-synch to prerecorded vocals. If we want to understand why so many people are upset about this trend, why state legislators in New York and New Jersey have proposed regulating the use of recorded music in live concerts, we need to look at the next track.

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Track Four. If Ong's observations about orality and literacy account for recording's increasing power to shape performance in its own image, it is Derrida's demonstration of Western culture's historical preference for speech over writing that explains why this process has been so resisted. For, surely, recording amounts to simply another means of writing, and thus it becomes regarded as secondary or supplemental to performance. Indeed, many of the objections raised to the new recording technologies (especially to sampling) reiterate precisely the Platonic objections to writing made in the Phaedrus, the dialogue so carefully remarked upon by Derrida.!6 Writing, Plato argued, by providing mankind with an artificial method of storing knowledge, eroded our real powers of memory. Sampling and sequencing, go the current complaints, make musicians unnecessary: you can make records now entirely by recombining bits and pieces sampled from other records; you don't have to playa musical instrument at all.!? We can detect here the historical complaint against every new technology and every avant-garde movement that embraces it: the new technology makes things too easy. What previously was possible for only a few (storing large amounts of information, producing a figurative representation of a person or object, making a record) becomes possible for many with, respectively, writing, photography, and sampling. Plato dismissed writing as artificial memory. This characterization issued from his own anxious, prescient intuition of all technology's fundamental automatism, its potential to continue producing long after the control exacted by human consciousness has been relinquished. For Plato, the ghost in the machine was language that survived not only its author, but also every context of its own enunciation. In the twentieth century that fear has persisted, finding representation in the movies' fatal robots (Blade Runner), Frankensteinian monsters devouring assembly lines (Modern Times), and computers-run-amok (2001). But the rock community has developed an alternative attitude toward its technology's independence. After the Velvet Underground and]imi Hendrix, concerts frequently ended with guitarists leaving their instruments onstage for the self-sustaining feedback that would accompany the audience's departure. At the other end, the Who began opening shows with "Baba O'Riley's" pro-

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grammed synthesizer pattern, set to continue throughout the song. Were these strategies part of a ritual, whose basis was precisely that loss of self which Plato feared? Or were they simply a sanguine (and loud) promise of future songs, future shows? Disciplines such as film studies and the history of science have shown us that, far from being disinterested, technology follows the route of ideology. Western culture's animus toward writing, therefore, would help to explain why, in a culture of headlong change, recording technology has taken such a relatively long time to develop. If one conceives of live performance as the privileged instance, and of recording as only a supplemental means of capturing it, then such things as multitrack tape recorders, reverberation and delay units, compressors, pitch controllers, harmonizers and doublers, sequencers and samplers, will all seem less important, and their invention and implementation will have to wait.

Track Five. I should reveal here something about my own interest in what I am writing about. Since 1982, I have been an active member of a rock band armed with a strange name, for which, I hasten to add, I am not responsible: the Vulgar Boatmen. In fact, as I write, I have just emerged from a two-week session for a second record, during which many of the technologies I have mentioned were used. I will give only one example. For one song, our drummer happened by accident upon an unusual and pleasing snare drum sound. I won't go into details, but only mention that achieving this sound involved a kind of juggling act, holding the drum between the legs so that one foot rested against the lower drum head (slightly muffling the snares) while striking the other head with a combination of cross-sticking and taped brush. Well, it seemed worth it at the time. A week later, however, in mixing, he discovered that for all of its appealing sound, the snare was poorly played (perhaps because it was so difficult to hold), often falling so far behind the beat that any sense of pulse was lost. How to fix it? The drummer started by honoring speech and performance: he wanted to replay the part from start to finish. But five hours' work convinced him that a sound he had achieved by accident could not be reproduced by calculation. He then chose to sample one

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snare hit (which, after all, he had produced himself) and replay the part by simply triggering this sampled sound in the appropriate, and now properly timed, places. This process has come to seem normal. What nevertheless still seems strange about the Vulgar Boatmen, especially to the rock press, which never fails to mention this fact when writing about us, is that there are two sets of Vulgar Boatmen, one in Florida that records and one in Indianapolis that tours. Only one person, the Indianapolis leader, regularly participates in both groups, since he also works on all recordings. While this arrangement derived from practical circumstances (I have a job which prevents my touring, I have a family, my idea of a tour resembles Brian Eno's: I stay in one place and the audience comes to see me), I now realize that having two bands of Vulgar Boatmen enacts the performance/recording dichotomy at the heart of so many debates about contemporary rock & roll. Warhol signaled his acceptance of technology's automatism by calling his studio The Factory, by basing his serial paintings on found photographs, by sending other men to fulfill his speaking engagements. Having cloned ourselves once, the Vulgar Boatmen might become available for franchising-a Vulgar Boatmen in every town, always accompanied by a sign: 6,352 records sold.

Track Six. In a recent issue of the MLA's journal Profession, Marianna Torgovnick calls for an "experimental critical writing," but admits that she does not yet know how to produce it. 18 For the past few years, my own courses have asked students to do such experimenting, and I have worked from the assumption, proposed by my colleague Gregory Ulmer, that the avant-garde arts might provide ideal models for different kinds of writing. 19 My own project has been to start with a group of films, the Andy Hardy movies, that beg for the kind of ideological, semiotic, psychoanalytic criticism current in cultural studies, but then to prohibit students from taking that conventional approach. Instead, I have asked them to extrapolate from such models as surrealist games, Derrida's signature experiments (in Si8nsponae and Glas), Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (a hybrid text, part novel, part biography, part criticism), Benjamin's Arcades Project

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(a never-finished collage of found material on nineteenth-century Paris), Godard's films and television programs, Barthes's autobiography (with its alphabetized fragments).2o Six months ago, when I first thought about this essay, I assumed that recording might provide yet another model for experiments with critical writing, which has traditionally resembled simply transcriptions of spoken lectures. What kind of academic writing, I asked myself, would result from the alphabetic equivalents of studio effects like reverberation, delay, sampling, flanging, phase-shifting, doubling, equalization, compression? But just as mixing or editing can often produce a different song or movie than one expected, so mixing these tracks here has led me to a different conclusion and to three final propositions.

Final Mix. (I) What distinguishes rock & roll from all the music that precedes it-especially classical, Tin Pan Alley, and jazz-is its elevation of the record to primary status. While classical and jazz recordings for the most part aimed only at approximating live performances, regarded as the significant event, many of rock's most important musicians, beginning with Elvis, made records before ever appearing in public. In fact, the performances that began rock & roll, Elvis's Sun recordings, could not be reproduced in any live situation except a very small and empty (to permit reverberation) room, since Elvis's acoustic guitar and Bill Black's acoustic bass simply could not be heard. (Having grown up in Memphis, I know. I attended several early Elvis performances.) Thus, any complaints against Madonna or Janet Jackson for not starting as live performers ignore rock's history. (2) Derrida and others have alerted us to postmodernism's defining condition: the triumph of an opposition's previously suppressed term. At the end of the twentieth century, we live in a world in which we almost always encounter a representation of something (the Mona Lisa, Mikhail Gorbachev, Bruce Springsteen) before we encounter the thing itself. Where once records hoped only to provide a souvenir of a live performance, concerts now exist to promote records, and to do so they use technology to reproduce as much of the recorded sound, and associated imagery, as possible. In embracing this state of affairs and the technology that has created it, rock affirms its postmodernism.

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In rejecting this situation, in clinging to speech/performance as the authentic site of musical presence, jazz clings to previous traditions, especially those of modernism. (3) As I have said, I began preparation for this essay by thinking of recording (not songwriting) as a model for academic writing. But I now realize that the relationship is the reverse. For writing, as the more advanced technology, has been the example for recording. What, after all, is sampling except quotation, which writers do all the time? What are punch-ins except revisions? What are multitracks but columns? I would argue, however, that academic writing, a particularly retrograde subspecialty, continues to make very little use of the technology's resources, and that it might begin to notice how much more willingly recording engineers, producers, and musicians have begun to experiment with what is possible. Notes The term" AABA song" refers to the Tin Pan Alley norm of chorus/chorus/bridge/ chorus. Show tunes typically began with a "verse," an introductory section that occurred only once. While maintaining the AABA form, rock & roll dropped the verse, except in such rare cases as the Lennon-McCartney "Do You Want to Know a Secret?" with its opening "You'll never know how much I really love you / You'll never know how much I really care." This move, and the inclusion of Broadway's "Till There Was You" on their first American LP, suggests how much the Lennon-McCartney team owed to Tin Pan Alley. 2 Quoted in Stephen Holden's "Paul Simon's Journey to Brazil and Beyond," New York Times, 14 October 1990. 3 Public Enemy's Hank Shocklee, quoted in "Ebony and Ivory," an interview/conversation between Paul Simon and Hank Shocklee, Spin, January 1991, 84. 4 Mark Dery, "Public Enemy: Confrontation," Keyboard, September 1990, 84: "Rap, by definition, is political music. Fabricated from stolen snatches of prerecorded music by smash-and-grab producers who frequently thumb their noses at copyright laws, it is the musical equivalent of shoplifting." Despite this remark, Dery's article displays considerable sympathy for rap in general and Shocklee in particular. 5 See Walter Benjamin, "Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian," in One-Way Street and Other Writin8s, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London, 1979), 1

349- 86 .

6 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seein8: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 241. 7 Quoted by Buck-Morss in Dialectics of Seein8, 240-41; emphasis mine.

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"The more probable (banal) the message, the less information it conveys": Gregory L. Ulmer, Applied Grammatoloay (Baltimore, 1985),3°8. 9 Meaghan Morris puts the matter bluntly: "I get the feeling that somewhere in some English publisher's vault there is a master disk from which thousands of versions of the same article ... are being run off under different names with minor variations" ("Banality in Cultural Studies," in Loaics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp [Bloomington, 1990], 21). While the Wall Street Journal has denounced this tendency as indicative of American academics' overwhelming leftism (see "Politically Correct," Wall Street Journal, 26 November 1990), it in fact signals precisely the opposite: a commitment to capitalism and business-as-usual. Since at least the eighteenth century, ideas (like any product) have been subject to commodification. But what marks contemporary intellectual life is the intense speed with which even the most critical positions can become the newest way to make a living. With the chronic oversupply of Ph.D.'s enabling the humblest colleges to link promotion, tenure, and now hiring itself to publication, more and more people are producing more and more books and articles. Because these people are often working on deadlines (at my university, assistant professors have only five years before the tenure decision). they inevitably gravitate to hot areas, those methodologies and topics that insure publication. As a result, cultural criticism. more than ever before. is now subject to the boom-and-bust cycles that have always haunted capitalism. This development has real effects: at any given moment, everyone seems to be writing about the same thing-and then, no one is. Morris cites a Japanese media analyst's coolness toward a collection containing several essays on Foucault: "Ah Foucault ... I'm very sorry, but there's no boom" ("Banality in Cultural Studies," Discourse 10 [Spring-Summer 1988]: 5-this essay is a slightly different version of the one cited above). Again the pop analogy seems appropriate: a hit parade of critical ideas that changes every month. 10 See Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy (London, 1982) for a summary of research on this topic. Jack Goody's books are more specific, but equally interesting. See especially his The Domestication of the Savaae Mind (Cambridge, 1977) and The Loaic of Writina and the Oraanization of Society (Cambridge, 1986). I lOng, Orality and Literacy, 51. 12 The pioneer in extending this argument to music was Glenn Gould. In his famous 1966 essay "The Prospects of Recording," Gould stated flatly that "[w]e must be prepared to accept the fact that, for better or worse, recording will forever alter our notions about what is appropriate to the performance of music" (The Glenn Gould Reader, ed. Tim Page [New York, 1984], 337). In particular, Gould maintained that the advent of tape splicing, by means of which perfect performances could be constructed in the studio, created for live performances audience expectations impossible to satisfy. In this context, classical performances became what Gould called "the last blood sport," something like a high-wire act where the audience waits breathlessly for the fall. Significantly. Gould argued that this development cut both ways. On the one

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hand, it encouraged conservatism among performers, afraid to take on new or difficult pieces for audiences grown unaccustomed to, and ultimately intolerant of, mistakes of any kind. On the other hand, recordings create active listeners who themselves could, by taking charge of their own editing, develop utterly nonconformist attitudes toward music and its history. If rap recording seems the result of this latter development, the spread of lip-syncing and tapes in "live" performance appears to issue from the former. All discussions about contemporary music and its technology should begin with Gould's warning that "[t]he technology of electronic forms makes it highly improbable that we will move in any direction but one of even greater intensity and complexity" (Page, ed., Glenn Gould Reader, 35 2 ). 13

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Glenn Gould was quick to spot the obvious analogy between the recording process and filmmaking: "[O]ne should be free to 'shoot' a Beethoven sonata or a Bach fugue in or out of sequence, intercut almost without restriction, apply postproduction techniques as required, and ... the composer, the performer, and above all the listener will be better served thereby" (Page, ed., Glenn Gould Reader, 359). Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, 1977), sec. I. In his interesting book The Recordins Ansel: Explorations in Phonosraphy (New York, 1987), Evan Eisenberg proposes that "[r]ecords and radio were the proximate cause of the Jazz Age.... [R]ecords not only disseminated jazz, but inseminated it- .... [I]n some ways they created what we call jazz" (143-44). To avoid paying royalties, groups like King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band and Armstrong's Hot Five replaced published songs with on-the-spot improvisations whose recording granted them a permanence they would otherwise never have had. Jacques Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy," in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, 1981), 61-171. Public Enemy's Hank Shocklee has made explicit the implications of sampling and sequencing: We don't like musicians. We don't respect musicians. . . . In dealing with rap, you have to be innocent and ignorant of music. Trained musicians are not ignorant of music, and they cannot be innocent to it. They understand it, and that's what keeps them from dealing with things out of the ordinary.... [Public Enemy is] a musician's nishtmare. (Keyboard, September 1990, 82-8 3)

18

Another Shocklee remark indicates what's at stake: "You get a person who says, 'I don't have time to study an instrument.' Rappers sample" (Spin, January 1991, 61). Marianna Torgovnick, "Experimental Critical Writing," Profession 90 (1990): 25-

19

Gregory L. Ulmer, Teletheory: Grammatolosy in the Ase of Video (New York,

20

For a preliminary report on this project, see my "The Avant Garde Finds Andy Hardy," in Modernity and Mass Culture, ed. Patrick Brantlinger and James Naremore (Bloomington, 1991).

27· 1989), 18-19.

Mark Dery

Signposts on the Road to Nowhere: Laurie Anderson's Crisis of Meaning

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world is disappearing. Oliver Wendell Holmes augured this surreal state of affairs in "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph," his 1859 essay on what was then a newly arrived technological marvel: photography. "Form is henceforth divorced from matter," he declared. "In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped." Jean Baudrillard, in his 1975 essay, "The Precession of Simulacra," posited the notion that the world as we know it is a hyperreality of simulacra, a hall of mirrors where the original is lost in an infinite regress of reflections. And Bryan Fawcett argued, in The Public Eye: A Deliberation on the Disappearance of the World, that mass media images of desire-commodified, strategically deployed by Madison Avenue, constitute the better part of reality for all who view the world through the cathode-ray tube. The assertion that reality is undergoing a gradual process of dematerialization is

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evidenced, literally as well as metaphorically, by events in every corner of the cultural arena. Cosmologists, for example, now believe that the universe is comprised, in large part, of an invisible mass called "dark matter." Jaron Lanier, founder of VPL Research, Inc., is spearheading the development of "virtual reality," a computer-based technology that allows cybernauts equipped with motion-sensing Datagloves and televisual goggles called EyePhones to roam digital dreamscapes. On This Week with David Brinkley, NPR reporter Cokie Roberts observed that death by joystick in the Persian Gulf, viewed through bomber nose-cone cameras, seemed like a video game. And our commodity culture, once based on manufactured goods, now trades in intangibles: brand names, junk bonds, cultural heroes, celluloid myths. "We sell fabulous merchandise at very high prices," confided a Disney executive in a December 1990 Fortune cover story titled "Pop Culture: America's Hottest Export Goes Boom!" "But what we really sell is the Disney characters-warmth and honesty and family." One result of this inversion of the time-honored primacy of original over reproduction has been what German cultural theorists call Sinnkrise, a "crisis of meaning." In "The Semiotics of Semiotics," in the anthology On Signs, Wlad Godzich details the multiform manifestations of this crisis: "The great explanatory systems of the West are felt to be inadequate, if not obsolete, whether they be of a socialdemocratic, Marxist or educated-liberal variety. The master narratives are dying for lack of credibility . . . and nothing is taking their place." The crisis of meaning crystallizes in the art of Laurie Anderson. A performance artist cum pop star, Anderson makes virtual vaudeville for a world of pure simulacra. When Roland Barthes defined semiosis, in Elements of Semiology, as "images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all these," he could have been describing a Laurie Anderson performance. Her brand of cybercabaret is a synesthesiac's dream, a giddy headrush of song and soliloquy counterpointed by still and moving images. Of course, her art hasn't always been one of push-button presto chango. Formally trained-she graduated magna cum laude in art history from Barnard College in 1969, and took an MFA in sculpture

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from Columbia University in 1972-she began as a post-conceptualist, meditating, then as now, on our mediated society. She sculpted newsprint pulp into post-Gutenberg fetishes, cut newspapers into ribbons and wove them into latticed, Mondrian-like collages. Early performances such as For Instants (1976) constituted chapters in a fictionalized autobiography: Hunched under an umbrella in an imaginary downpour or pretending to row a boat across a gallery floor, she told droll, beguiling stories about growing up in well-to-do Glenn Ellyn, Illinois, the daughter of a paint manufacturer; hitchhiking to the North Pole; and living in Chiapas, Mexico, with the last remaining Mayan tribe "as a spy for [her] anthropologist brother." In time, she moved away from the elitist sensibility native to white-walled Soho galleries, a hermetic aesthetic she would later lampoon in her 1989 song cycle, Empty Places, where she suggested that would-be performance art stars obtain housecats-"preferably rather limp ones"-and make them act out the words to Stephen Foster's "Swanee." In place of such self-important silliness, she offered unabashedly accessible fare that borrowed equally from high and mass culture. In 1979, art Brahmin Holly Solomon commissioned a work for her husband's birthday, and Anderson produced Americans on the Move, a blend of sights, sounds, and special effects that would later become United States. As]anet Kardon notes in Laurie Anderson-Works from 1969 to 1983: "Up to this time, Anderson seems to have identified herself primarily as a sculptor; molding a space with her own prescence could be construed as an extension of a sculptor'S activity. This changed [at the Carnegie Hall performance of Americans on the Move, where she] ... commanded the stage, with attendant musicians as visible counterpoints to her persona and the instrumentation more strongly identified with rock music." Two years later, "0 Superman," the nuclear mantra from her Gesamtkunstwerk, United States, had been released on an independent label and was climbing the British pop charts; shortly thereafter, she signed a record contract with Warner Bros. Anderson's departure from the world of performance art, a high modernist tradition strongly rooted in Dada's absurdist cabaret, the geometric dances of the Bauhaus, and the Dionysian happenings of the 1960s, was nearly complete.

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United States, Parts I-IV (1983), was a watershed in her development. A six-hour symphony for slides, shadow play, semiotics, and semiconductors, it is the equivalent of Marshall McLuhan's The Medium Is the Massa8e set to music. Thematically divided into four sections-transportation, politics, money, and love-it is a sometimes jocular, often jaundiced look at America, seen through the wide eyes of a rooster-coifed waif, a new wave incarnation of Chaplin's Tramp. Throughout, the operant mode is avant-vaudeville: glib, darkly funny "bits" are delivered with a nightclub comedian's sense of timing, bookended by visual and instrumental interludes. Harpo Marx-ist theatrics-Anderson "singing" by means of a tiny pillow speaker concealed in her mouth, rapping out a percussion solo on her contact-miked skull, or pantomiming bowling to the taped accompaniment of a ball rumbling down a lane and knocking over pins-are a far cry from Joseph Beuys's alchemical rituals, the Kipper Kids' Three Stooges version of the Theater of Cruelty, and other 1970S performance art; they are closer in style to the pratfalls and pie-in-the-face antics of a music hall showman. The parallel can be seen in United States' score as well, where the honking klaxons, slide whistles, and kazoos of vaudeville sound effects men resound in Anderson's squeaking baby gavels, quacking toy saxophones, chattering percussion, and electronic wolf howls. Her trademark tape-bow violin (an ordinary violin rigged with an audio playback head and played with a bow whose horsehair has been replaced by prerecorded tape) seems more like a ventriloquist's dummy than a musical instrument when it speaks with a human voice. Even her use of pitch-shifters and digital delays to create alter egos-a stern, eat-your-peas authoritarian, a naive hayseed-is distinctly vaudevillian. Razzle-dazzle routines, equal parts talk show, MTV, and Mister Wizard, play in Peoria; performance art like that documented by Bruce Nauman in Bouncin8 Balls (1969), a nine-minute movie of the artist playing with his testicles, filmed close-up and in slow motion, does not. Performance art, which flared in the 1970S, fizzled in the 1980s; its few remaining practitioners-Karen Finley is perhaps the best known among them-want desperately to communicate with their audiences. In a sense, then, Laurie Anderson and the populist ethos she embodies have triumphed. As she only half-facetiously con-

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fides, in "Yankee See," "I was out in L.A. recently on music business, and I was ... filling them in on some of my goals / And I said: Listen, I've got a vision / I see myself as part of a long tradition of American humor / You know-Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Roadrunner, Yosemite Sam / And they said: Well, actually, we had something a little more adult in mind / And I said: O.K.! O.K.! Listen, I can adapt!" And adapt she has. Having recorded five albums for a major label, released Home of the Brave, a $165 million concert film, and even written a jingle for Reebok, she is well on her way to becoming the "Bob Hope kind of person" to whom she once compared herself. Still, there's that nagging question of the crisis of meaning. It is a question that has dogged her down through the years, as the following siftings from her clip file indicate. Debra Rae Cohen, writing in a June 1982 issue of Villa8e Voice, sniffed, "Laurie Anderson's aphoristic recitations and elliptical lyrics add up to less and less the longer she stays on stage." In the March 1984 issue of Artforum, Thomas McEvilley excoriated the artist for her tendency to dish up moldy chestnuts, time and again: Over the years, Anderson has recycled the same texts, and [her retrospective exhibition] followed her lead-I saw one language "bit" in five different places, the dates ranging from 1972 to 1983. The result is to make a slender body of work look fat. If the texts were deeper or sharper one would not mind their constant repackaging, and could be more appreciative of the cleverness of the packaging, but they are, after all, just the rather lightweight, caught-in-a-Ioop, hip posturing familiar from United States (where many of the old texts resurfaced). John Piccarella wrote, in a January 1985 Villa8e Voice article, that the "criticism most often leveled at Anderson's work is that it has the hollow ring of signs without referents." "She's not a thinker," asserted Gregory Sandow, in an April 1986 Village Voice. "Along with Dylan Thomas, she might say., 'I'm never very hot on meaning; it's the sound [and in her case the look] of meaning that I like.'" And Erika Munk, in her October 1989 Villa8e Voice review of Empty Places, observed that the performance rendered "absence, lack, loneliness in ways much more distressing than Laurie Anderson intends. Perhaps it can

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never be said often enough that referring to an event or person or idea isn't always throwing a stone into a vast pond of meaning so we can contemplate the ripples. Mostly it's just picking an idea up and dropping it, thump. [E]ven when [Anderson] does an extended riff, she does no more than lay the subject out for our inspection." Laurie Anderson's art is information anxiety incarnate, fashioned from the white noise of postmodernity-sound bites, photo ops, advertising jingles, TV themes, pop songs, slang, and doublespeak. Implying everything, signifying nothing, it generates much heat, little light. In White Noise, Don DeLillo's harrowing chronicle of one man's descent into the media maelstrom, brand names, bromides, and buzzwords worm their way into the narrator's innermost thoughts, "the coded messages and endless repetitions . . . like mantras." So in Anderson, where singsong wordplay-"Talkshow, Uplink, Update, Phaselock, Downtime, Hotline," "Stop the press, beat the clock, rock the cradle, and rule the world"-is substituted for substance. "Say Hello" and "Lighting Out for the Territories," the routines that bookend United States, are revealing. "You can read the signs," assures Anderson. "You've been on this road before." Again, as the last strains fade and the piece draws to a close, she purrs, "You can read the signs.... You can do this in your sleep." But it is a semiotician's nightmare, a road to nowhere dotted with signs pointing only at each other. Endlessly traveling, never arriving, she-and we who accompany her as her audience-is a Kerouac who has mistaken a treadmill for the road, a Huckleberry Finn lighting out for territories he will never find.

The following interview was conducted on II June 1989 in Charleston, South Carolina, minutes after Anderson's performance of Empty Places, the multimedia theater piece that closed that year's Spoleto Festival. Anderson, it should be noted, is an incandescent presence. Her smooth skin has a milky translucency to it, as if her features were sculpted out of quartz, and her large, intelligent eyes give her gaze a powerfully mesmeric quality. Quizzical eyebrows and an elfin grin, topped off by a mussed, moussed new wave do and a wardrobe that

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runs to rumpled, outsized men's suitcoats and frumpy sneakers, make her resemble a cross between Marcel Marceau's Mister Bip and the gamine in Chaplin's City Li8hts. Although she will soon turn 44, she possesses an uncanny, Peter Pan-ish ability to look forever childlike. Speaking in the cool, exquisitely modulated tones of a classical radio announcer, she pauses often, choosing her words with care as she snaps the filter off yet another Marlboro. Poised, professional, and intensely private, she is adept at the art of amiable obfuscation. Questions that probe a little too close to the bone, ideologically or biographically, are deflected, invariably, with an anecdote, often one that has been honed to perfection through repetition. Like Pee-Wee Herman, Ronald Reagan, and Michael Jackson, she is always in character: her onstage and offstage personae are virtually inseparable. She seems, in fact, to view her interviews as scaled-down versions of her performances. Her tone, like that used in concert, is an unlikely mingling of childlike awe and postmodern irony; her sentences are interrupted by the same arbitrary caesuras that mark time in her onstage monologues. The overall impression is that of an Audio-Animatronic minikin hosting a Disney recreation of the New York art world. Perhaps one of her characters said it best in "Language is a Virus," from Home of the Brave: And he said: Hey! Are you talking to me? Or are you just practicing For one of those performances of yours?

You begin Empty Places with a first-person anecdote about falling into a New York sewer. What was it like down there? Big gators splashing around? LAURIE ANDERSON: No gators, although after I'd fallen in somebody gave me a book called Underneath New York that says there have reportedly been some gator sightings, but I don't know, the whole thing sounds a little sketchy. The sewer was very stinky; that was the main thing. And the other thing was, after I fell in, a lot of people were passing by and I was trying to pull myself out-I was right in front of

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my agent's door-and I kept poking my head out and saying, "Could you, uh, ring that doorbell for me?" And they kept saying, "Wait a second-what route did you take?" MARK DERY: That story, which ends up with you in a hospital emergency room, surrounded by homeless people, strikes me as the linchpin of the show; it rattles the audience in a way that none of the other monologues do. It seems like a turning point for you, the beginning of something new and gritty, something with real bite. LAURIE ANDERSON: Well, there's lots of first-person narrative in Empty Places, and they're all based on something. I think when you put a date on it, the way I did with this particular piece, it somehow seems more real. You see, I'm not sure I understand people's reactions to this piece. MARK DERY: Is it somehow perhaps more resonant, more jagged-edged than the rest of the show? LAURIE ANDERSON: It's an unadorned story about pain and it doesn't have any imaginary items in it like hosts of angels mowing your lawn. I had hoped to have the whole performance feel more raw and by the time it's finished, it probably will feel more jagged. I think, by the time it's performed in New York [at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 3-15 October 1989J, a third of it will probably be different. MARK DERY: In a sense, you predicted this piece in an interview with Charles Amirkhanian in The Guests Go in to Supper when you said, "The next thing that I do will be a solo work, just a couple of hand puppets, strip it down." LAURIE ANDERSON: In fact, it's quite a relief for me not to be working with a band. I'm no good at rounding people up and talking to them on the phone about rehearsal times, and I'm not a good band leader, I don't give people enough to do. I say, "Well, here's this tape and it goes, 'Ugh-glug-glug,' and they're going, 'Ohhh, areat, that sounds like fun.' " Sometimes, I've used them as soloists, which is my only solution to the whole problem, but I found that I still had to pay a lot of attention to the band, not just before the show, rehearsing, but during the performance as well. Band rapport is not one of my strong points [affects Miles Davis-style jazz cool growl], "Hey, like, you know, dude, I'll trade licks with the bass player." I'm more interested in making contact with the audience. That, as far as I'm concerned,

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is where the show is going on; it's not happening on the stage. I've never liked that kind of onstage banter and goofing around. I'm not that kind of musician or person. MARK DERY: I expected Empty Places to be Laurie Anderson fiddling avant-folk tunes around the digital campfire. Instead, you're still swaddling the voice in digital harmonizer, silhouetting your live playing against taped backing tracks. You've said you like to frighten yourself; wouldn't it have been more frightening to go out there for an hour and just ... play fiddle? LAURIE ANDERSON: You know, I'm not sure how interesting that would be, given my fiddle playing. I did do a European tour this year, in Berlin and Paris, that was quite stripped-down. There was just a little bit of video in it, but hardly anything else; that was the closest I've come to doing something as pared down as I could. I enjoyed that a lot, and I learned something from doing it, but I also learned that I really like to use images. MARK DERY: I'm curious about the process whereby you choose what image will be linked to a given lyric. I sense a tension in your work between your stated desire not to be didactic and the obvious need to have content of some sort, especially in a narrative context. Critics have lobbed bombs at you for counterpointing lyrics that are more or less strings of non sequiturs with seemingly unrelated, iconic images. For example, one song in Empty Places, about a dream, is accompanied by a visual subtext-slides of rumpled bedsheets, whose meaning is obvious enough, and a sequence featuring an umbrella. There's nothing more cloddish than asking an artist what the umbrella means, but what does the umbrella mean? LAURIE ANDERSON: Well, I wanted to make something that was just a very pristine sort of thing and I had a whole sequence of umbrellas opening and closing for another song and they ended up being too illustrative for that song. I wanted to get a few white images that could suggest what I was talking about, which was dream imagery that just gets intercut with itself so that it becomes increasingly irrational. More than anything else, I was organizing the images in the same way that things get organized in your dreamworld. I wanted to suggest just a little bit of motion, you know, an umbrella opening and closing.

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MARK DERY: Tell me the difference-and I'm entirely willing to believe there is one-between one of your pieces, where you're reciting a monologue or singing a song framed by seemingly unrelated slides or filmic images, and MTV, where one encounters the gratuitous surrealism of tubas flying through windows, this joe Six-Pack version of Rene Magritte. What separates your performances from an assemblage of dreamlike images that really don't add up to anything? LAURIE ANDERSON: The things that work the best in my work, visually, are things that connect rhythmically and also thematically to what's happening in the text. I mean, I work in many different ways. In the case of a song like "Coolsville" (Stran8e An8els), which is accompanied in Empty Places by these digitized people moving by, I had this film I'd shot in japan and digitized. I really liked watching their faces and so I wrote a song based on that film. It came from just rolling the film for a few days, watching it. MARK DERY: "Coolsville" seems to be a conflation of an adolescent girl looking at the ideal man, a cross between james Dean and the Marlboro Man, and Americans looking at the japanese. LAURIE ANDERSON: It's not really about the japanese, although they understand what I'm doing very well. They get it. I think they appreciate that electronics work; they like to see buttons. But I have no interest in spending much time in japan; I have much more interest in spooking around here, seeing what's going on. To me, being in Charleston is almost as foreign as being in japan, certainly more so than being in Tokyo, which seems very similar to New York, as far as the art world goes. MARK DERY: Much of your work is a meditation on America; if there were anything intrinsically American about your work, what would it be? LAURIE ANDERSON: One of the digitally harmonized voices, this guy who's definitely a midwestern, cornpone-type guy, an incredibly naive, cheerful yokel willing to tackle any topic that comes his way. He's the ultimate shoe salesman. MARK DERY: To return, for a moment, to this idea of discursive, nonlinear structure in your work. You admire Pynchon and joyce, but in the writing of each, every image serves, arguably, to advance the plot, whereas in your work there's a sense of interchangeability-one

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slide can work as well as the next. What would Pynchon or Joyce have to say about Empty Places, I wonder? LAURIE ANDERSON: I don't think one slide works as well as the next. I've tried it, believe me. MARK DERY: SO each slide that we're seeing is the best possible slide to illustrate that lyric? LAURIE ANDERSON: Well, I wouldn't say that either. In some cases, that's true; in other cases, I'm quite aware that the visuals need some chopping. You see, I don't really know until I get the visuals up on the screen what they're going to feel like, because they don't look the same on paper, obviously; you throw it up on the wall and you say, "Whoops, that's not it at all," it feels flat or it suggests something completely different. So the sooner I start shooting and recording, the better; I tend to get off the paper pretty fast. MARK DERY: Shifting gears again: Your work has always managed to be puckish and haunting, but now, for the first time, it has a razoredged, angry quality. Does this come out of nowhere, or has it always been there, lurking in the shadows? LAURIE ANDERSON: Where would you say that is? MARK DERY: Certainly in Empty Places's feminist numbers, songs such as "Beautiful Red Dress." Are you angrier than you were in the past? LAURIE ANDERSON: Probably, yeah. MARK DERY: What's making you angry these days? LAURIE ANDERSON: Oh, that the feminist movement doesn't seem to have made much difference at all. There's been a tiny bit of progress, but what does that really mean to the woman on the street? Not a hell of a lot. That's why I talked about the discrepancy between what men and women earn in that song; it really comes down to money for a lot of women. MARK DERY: How do you feel about the ascent of neo-folkie feminists such as Tracy Chapman, Michelle Shocked? LAURIE ANDERSON: It's great. I love one person/one instrument things; I think that's really exciting, and both of those people do that very, very well. I never really loved folk singing, though, except for Bob Dylan, who was wordy. And raunchy. I guess I wish the girls in pop music would get a little bit raunchier. MARK DERY: But you're not raunchy.

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I'd like to try to get raunchier! This is advice for myself as well. MARK DERY: It seems to bother people that sex rarely intrudes on the world portrayed by your work. LAURIE ANDERSON: Oh, but it does! I think it figures incredibly prominently! MARK DERY: By its absence, maybe. LAURIE ANDERSON: I wouldn't say that at all. One of the longest songs in Empty Places is "Red Dress," and I don't know how someone could say that has nothing to do with sex. As far as I'm concerned, sexual stereotyping is built into this particular work. MARK DERY: In that song, you create invisible backing vocalists by singing through digital harmonizers. But they're more than a chorus; they have personalities. LAURIE ANDERSON: They are personalities, and their biggest role in this particular show is in "Red Dress," as "the girls." They sometimes sing in chorus with the shoe salesman-type voice, and sometimes with me, it depends. "Red Dress" is a diatribe, and in it, the girls have a plan. It's not fleshed out, but they know they're gonna save themselves, somehow. MARK DERY: From-? LAURIE ANDERSON: Things too numerous to mention. There's one verse in the song that runs, "Well they say women shouldn't be / the president / 'Cause we go crazy from time to time / Well push my button baby here I come / Yeah look out baby / I'm at high tide." The idea of using that crazy sexual energy to be creative and not to be exiled into the swamp intrigues me. I mean, when you talk about, for example, the human condition, who are you talking about? Your little sixyear-old brother? A seventy-five-year-old woman? No, you're talking about a man. It sounds preachy to say this, but if more women made history or wrote history books, when you discussed the human condition, you'd discuss a certain kind of biological insanity and that, to me, would be extremely interesting-to respect that, to celebrate its crazy energy. Because it's very crazy and all women know and understand that and yet it's not considered a part of the human condition, but rather some sort of aberration. Glenda Jackson in Stran8e Interlude is an image that really haunts

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me. It's one of the most wonderful little monologues ever, where she's going on about if God were a woman, talking about how you basically have this guy who supposedly created the world, created it and is very proud of it, letting you know how quickly he did it-Seven days, pretty good, huh? So you come into a situation of pride and leave it into one of judgment, because he's also going to judge you for what you've done in this life. She wonders how things would be different if the universe had been born in the absolute agony of the female experience, instead of pride, and if we left the world to return to a fetal state. That maleness is so deeply ingrained in our culture. MARK DERY: We were talking earlier about anger, about the ragged edges in Empty Places. I was wondering, on that note, how the gang rape of the Central Park jogger affected you. LAURIE ANDERSON: Oh, I think it affected everyone the same wayfilled them with rage and real fear. Lots of teenagers are confused, but girls don't gang up and go out and try to kill someone; they just don't do it. It's not that I blame these kids, because I know you have to be macho to live in projects; I'm just saying that the whole culture is built on that "Don't be a wimp" ethos and to prove that, sometimes you have to kill someone. To me, that's pretty insane! MARK DERY: It's interesting to note, in light of your abhorrence of the ingrained maleness in our culture, that phallocentricity, that you often adopt a male narratorial voice. It seems rare that you address your audience in a feminine guise that isn't a caricature of femininity-the teenage girl dreaming of Frank Sinatra in "Smoke Rings" [Home of the Brave], for example. LAURIE ANDERSON: I don't exactly disagree that most of my work adopts that stance because when I use my own voice I speak as myself. It's true, I don't wear puffy sleeves or miniskirts. I talk like who I am, which is first, an artist, and second, a New Yorker, and third, a woman. I don't see myself as a woman first. MARK DERY: Perhaps that's why it was so startling to see you in a backless dress and elbow gloves for "Langue D' Amour," in Home of the Brave.

I was telling a story from the woman's point of view; it was Eve's story and also the snake's story, so I was a kind of combination woman and snake, with these black gloves. It probably

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is harder to use a harmonizer to give you a male voice if you wear a dress during a concert; it still is more usual to see women in pants than men in skirts. Too bad, because skirts are really comfortable. MARK DERY: Men, in your work, are usually George Orwell-meetsTennessee Williams "Big Daddy" archetypes-scientists, government officials, and other authority figures. They're never lovers, intimates, equals in romantic, sexual settings. LAURIE ANDERSON: I'm interested in authority figures. There's lots of really wonderful, tender love songs written so I don't often do that, myself; it's a genre that I think is pretty well covered. MARK DERY: "Beautiful Red Dress," with its references to full moons and high fevers, crackles with what strikes me as lesbian energy. In Empty Places, it's accompanied by a visual subtext of tiled walls that suggest a bathroom. Do you have any interest in addressing the gay audience? LAURIE ANDERSON: Only obliquely, I suppose. I think I've found a place for lots of people in Empty Places. There's a story about gay men having a bake sale to greet these sailors. I hadn't thought of "Beautiful Red Dress" as specifically gay but I suppose it is. I'd thought of it more as something odd going on with language. MARK DERY: Feeling this rage, as an artist, you reach inside yourself for an anecdote to illustrate it. In the case of Empty Places, you pulled out a story about picketing the Playboy bunnies in 1972, a story that goes back to a 1981 interview with Rob LeFrenais, editor of Performance magazine. What prompted you to reach that far back into the past as opposed to generating something new, a story you hadn't told before? LAURIE ANDERSON: Trying to make a lecture into a show very, very, very fast. I've been doing these lectures for a long time, allover the place. It's the kind of situation where I really want to cut down on the didacticism and make it punchier, although I do like a lot of talking in my shows. At the same time, I'm doing more singing now than ever before, although I'm not sure about the ratio because what was called talking in the past was often very soft, singsong things that I considered songs. To me, "Walking and Falling" [BiB Science] is a song. The ratio of speech to singing in a song like "Coolsville" is about half and half. I'm very aware of the fact that I'm not really a

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singer and yet it's very hard to go back and forth between singing and talking unless the song is written specifically that way. MARK DERY: You've been taking singing lessons, haven't you? LAURIE ANDERSON: Yeah, with Joan Lader. She's a wonderful teacher, in all kinds of ways. Her approach is based on a lot of physical exercises and ways to visualize sound. She's worked with a huge range of people, all of whom are very dedicated students of hers, ranging from Yoko Ono to Roberta Flack to Sting to Ryuichi Sakamoto to an opera singer who's lost his voice to a secretary who worked for three lawyers and every day one of them gave her different instructions and one day she just ... couldn't talk. Joan helped her to learn to talk again. She really respects the ways in which speech and singing are connected. MARK DERY: Why the decision, on your part, to learn to sing? LAURIE ANDERSON: I was shamed into it. I was doing a vocal on a song that required some back-up vocalists and they did their part and it was really wonderful and then I was supposed to do the lead vocal and I thought, Wait a second, I haven't even thought about how to sing this and besides, I don't know how to sing! I had this choice of croaking along like I usually do or half-talking, half-singing. So I thought, Well, I can do one of these things, neither of which will really work in the case of this song, or I can learn to sing. And then I said, Hey, learn to sing! I've wanted to get a new instrument-that would really be fun! So I just started working with Joan and it's really been so interesting. It's a very emotional experience to find where your spoken words become song. MARK DERY: I can really hear that in the half-sobbed, unabashedly emotional quality of "My Eyes." It's light-years away from the metallic, android inflections of some of your earliest performances. Do you want to have more of an emotional impact on your audiences these days? LAURIE ANDERSON: Yes, absolutely. On the other hand, I've always felt that. People sometimes think that this is some kind of tech show about something. To me, it's completely sensual; it's about things you see and hear rather than ideas you're going to write down. Some things need to be expressed that way, rather than just, Here's what it is. Art can be more flexible than that.

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On a tangent: you've studied Wittgenstein and "The Dream Before" [Stranae Anaels] is dedicated to the Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin. In the eighties, literary philosophers and cultural theorists such as]ean Baudrillard and]acques Derrida had a profound impact on the art world. Can their imprint be read in your work? LAURIE ANDERSON: No, absolutely not. I don't really get it when visual artists start talking about Derrida. MARK DERY: It seems that ideas, in some way, don't interest you as much as the forms they take. LAURIE ANDERSON: I'm not a writer, and I think that writers, for the most part, are more interested in that sort of thing. Then again, I don't know if I'd call myself a visual artist, either. I like images, but I haven't done any of the things that visual artists do, like have exhibitions. My visual sense only crops up in a very secondary way, although I had a lot of fun drawing bluebirds for the animated sequence in Empty Places. I was going to hire somebody to draw some bluebirds and then I thought, Why not do it myself? I bet that would be fun! I also like it when things look kind of crude. I wanted to set up a contrast in the piece between the hysterical cheerfulness of the bluebirds near a picket fence, this happy, wacky nature setting, and then just cut to a void-the bluebirds of lugubriousness. MARK DERY: Almost like the hyperreal birds in Blue Velvet. LAURIE ANDERSON: Oh yeah, it's definitely an homage to David Lynch. Anytime you see a white picket fence, you go, "David Lynch!" I like him because his work is about the underbelly, what's under the lawn. MARK DERY: Lynch, like David Byrne and yourself, is someone who has moved from the underground to the mainstream. In Empty Places, there are two routines where you lampoon the avant-garde. In one, you position stupid pet tricks as cutting-edge performance art, and in another you suggest that anyone who can tease out the meanings in "Yankee Doodle's" absurdist lyrics is ready to decipher avant-garde art. Do I detect a thinly veiled snideness there? LAURIE ANDERSON: Absolutely! The avant-garde gave up on me awhile ago. At first it hurt, and then I thought, Wait a minute-they're being totally consistent. One of the things about the avant-garde is that it has to be very self-protective, otherwise it won't survive. It has to be a situation of, Hey, hey, hey, we in here in the avant-garde know MARK DERY:

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what those poor suckers out there don't know. So as soon as I did something for the poor suckers outside who didn't know but nonetheless got it, I could no longer be considered part of that group. But then you do something here, in Charleston, South Carolina, something you think is a fairly accessible performance, and it's considered very avant-garde, so it depends on the context. I try to be both traditional and avant-garde. You can't always be working outside of traditions, because then what are your materials? I mean, there are certain things that I've gotten good at doing, and at the same time there are certain things that I want to break down, among them expectations. In a way, that's the whole point. Even something as simple as handing out sketchpads to audience members before the show, as I did this afternoon, can rattle peoples' expectations. In that sense, I think that I am an avant-garde artist. But I'm not sure what that means. Members of the avant-garde still come to things that I do and I still go to things that they do. I'm not that interested in what people say about the disappearance of the avant-garde. Somebody's always going to be sneaking around, breaking new rules. I find that very exciting. There are plenty of rules and taboos yet to be broken, and somebody's gotta do it. I'll do my part.

Michael Jarrett

Concerning the Progress of Rock & Roll

Histories of popular music routinely employ a model derived from nineteenth-century physical science in order to describe the process of popularization. What semioticians call conventionalization is most often characterized as a cultural equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics. Energy tends toward a state of equilibrium; "innovative, unconventional codes gradually become adopted by the majority." 1 John Fiske, in Introduction to Communication Studies, uses this entropy model to explain the "broad cultural acceptance" of jazz (presumably during the Swing Era). Dick Hebdige, in Subculture: The Meanina of Style, a now classic study of "punk" culture, relies on it too. What Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin call a theory of "progress by attrition" is, perhaps, the foundational myth of popular music. 2 It lies at the heart of all distinctions that attempt to delineate a boundary between the authentic and the commercial, in whatever guise that may take: rock vs. pop, black vs. white, modern vs. postmodern, art vs. commerce.

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Conventionalization, though, like its counterpart in physics, is in itself neither negative nor positive, neither good nor bad. It just isor so the discourse of communication theory would have us believe. A good description, this theory seems to at least tacitly argue, merely indicates-it does not seek to establish a norm. If we perceive conventionalization or popularization as a "lowering of quality because it involves appealing to the 'lowest common denominator,' " writes Fiske following Basil Bernstein, we should be aware that it [such a judgment] is made from within a particular value-system, one that values elaborated, narrowcast codes and the expression of individual differences. A valuesystem that rates highly the reinforcement of cultural ties and restricted, broadcast codes will find the metaphor of the lowest common denominator offensive, elitist and inaccurate. 3 All the same, descriptions of conventionalization typically, perhaps always, employ a rhetoric of degeneration. They chart it as a downward course, a semiotic diaspora, and rely on readers decoding such a journey Platonically, as a deviation from the Good. Hence, popularization receives a plot-tragedy-and thereby the very notion of the authentic (pure code) is erected as something opposed to the conventional (popularized code). Any reader familiar with the literature of deconstruction will recognize this "logocentric" opposition (founded on a notion of "presence"). It is yet another version of the opposition that pits ori8inal against copy. But demonstrating the untenability of the authentic/ conventional (pure/popular) opposition is not my desire. I do not care to recapitulate what has become the most standard sort of deconstructive reading. 4 Instead, I want to reread (then misread) the rhetoric of degeneration that informs the history of popular music. My first example is a brief tragicomic history of jazz, but it could be read allegorically as the "progress" of rock & roll. Hebdige writes: As the music fed into mainstream popular culture during the 20S and 30S, it tended to become bowdlerized, drained of surplus eroticism, and any hint of anger or recrimination blown along the "hot" lines was delicately refined into inoffensive night club sound. White swing represents the climax of this process:

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innocuous, generally unobtrusive, possessing a broad appeal, it was a laundered product which contained none of the subversive connotations of its original black sources. These suppressed meanings were, however, triumphantly reaffirmed in be-bop, and by the mid-50s a new, younger white audience began to see itself reflected darkly in the dangerous, uneven surfaces of contemporary avant-8arde, despite the fact that the musicians responsible for the New York sound deliberately sought to restrict white identification by producing a jazz which was difficult to listen to and even more difficult to imitate. 5 Hot jazz turns to swing, bop turns cool, eroticism becomes lassitude, black bleaches to white, the dirty gets laundered, and the uneven is worn smooth: the structure of this apocalyptic sequence reproduces itself any number of times in accounts of American popular music since World War II. To pick several examples, it is the story of how Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right" (a hit for Elvis Presley, 1956) became "Sugar Shack" (Jimmy Gilmer, 1963) and, then, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (the Beatles, 1964), or how 1960s rock became 1970S disco before its fundamental values were reaffirmed in late1970S punk (only to transform into the techno-dance music of the 1980s). It is also the structure of Elvis Presley's career: from 19561958 (hot as Memphis asphalt) to 1959-1967 (bland as grits) to 1968 (meaner than a hornet).6 This model of conventionalization-an aesthetic version of entropy as heat-death-adequately accounts for the degradation of a code imagined as original. It feels ontologically stable because it explains popularization: the process whereby "authentic" music (a narrowcast code) is translated into "commercial" music (a broadcast code) for the purpose of selling music to a wide audience. And it sounds (politically) correct because it explains what Andrew Ross calls "the everyday, plagiaristic, commerce between white ['commercial'] and black ['authentic'] musics"; it conceptualizes the history of American popular music as a series of unilateral, commercially driven energy exchanges that everywhere bespeak "a racist history of exploitation exclusively weighted to dominant white interests."? Like all received models, this one has its attractions. It also has real failings. As Ross points out, the formula "com-

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mercialized music == whitened music" simply will not hold. Since "commercial and contractual relations enter into all realms of musical entertainment, or at least wherever music is performed in order to make a living," there can be "no tidy coincidence" between "discourse about color ('whitened' music)" and "discourse about commercialization ('alienated' music)." To subscribe to such an equation is to imagine a very mechanical process indeed, whereby a music, which is authentically black, constitutes an initial raw material which is then appropriated and reduced in cultural force and meaning by contact with a white industry. Accordingly, music is never "made," and only ever exploited, in this process of industrialization. 8 The biggest failure of the heat-death model of conventionalization is this: it cannot account for innovation. By picturing the history of popular music as a downward spIral of "progress" by attrition, it fails to explain how so-called authentic music arises. More specifically, it continues to rely on the thinly disguised metaphysical assumption that genius visits select musicians, or (the more contemporary view) that the rock & roll muse does not strike so much as she resides within a "tradition." Serious musicians, through searching (one's "soul" or one's "roots"), locate her; listeners, on the other hand, find "authenticity" when they tune in to the exotic (Delta blues or world music), the esoteric ("alternative" music), or the canonical ("classic" rock). We need a better theory. I nominate one that extends the possibilities suggested by the old theory of conventionalization. It would exploit the potential energy of decay (decomposition), and in providing an account of innovation in rock & roll, it would suggest a paradigm of invention that could be generalized for every type of writing (for all fields of knowledge). In other words, I want to sketch out a theory that, without denying "degeneration," would insist that something is gained through conventionalization. Before initiating that project, however, I want to emphasize the overlap of "authentic" and "commercial" music. Only by unsettling this opposition can we begin to rethink a cultural model of conventionalization predicated on heat-death.

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Our experience of twentieth-century popular culture is defined by what Frith calls "the contrast between music-as-expression and music-as-commodity." He writes: "[HJowever much we may use and enjoy its products, we retain a sense that the music industry is a bad thing-bad for music, bad for US."9 For me (a white, male, and, now, middle-aged music consumer), "music-as-expression" has always meant African-American music. It was "authentic," a genuine outpouring of real feeling (quality is a function of closeness to the blues). I have long regarded commercialization as corruption: an "essential human activity" colonized. 1o I dote over artists such as Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Otis Redding, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Al Green, Sly and the Family Stone, and Parliament because, simply put, there "ain't nothing like the real thing, baby"; I love Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, and Roxy Music because they are-I tell myself"ironic." But there are two problems with this belief: (I) It is romantic and, ultimately, racist. Like Rousseau's Confessions (and, later, Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques), it imagines nonEuropean peoples "as the index to a hidden good Nature, as a native soil recovered, of a 'zero degree' with reference to which one could outline the structure, the growth, and above all the degradation of our society and our culture." It is, Jacques Derrida notes, enabled by remorse-the "remorse that produces anthropology." 11 (2) It supposes, as Frith points out, "that music is the starting point of the industrial process-the raw material over which everyone fights-when it is, in fact, the final product." 12 Certainly \vhite people exploited, and continue to exploit, black people. That point needs to be admitted. But it is also important to realize that "authentic" African-American music was an effect of industrialization. In its early years, radio fostered and relied upon live music, bands with members who could play endless variations of recognizable tunes (the Ellington and Basie orchestras), as well as bands with a staff of arrangers (the orchestras of Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey). Later, after the discovery of magnetic tape (one of the spoils of World War II), radio fostered and relied upon the recording industry. To oversimplify, the history of rock is a consequence of the development of recording technology (and, to some extent, television and video), just as the history of jazz is a consequence of radio (and,

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to some extent, a nightclub scene made possible by the invention of the electric light). Stated differently, radio was the prosthesis of jazz, just as magnetic tape was the prosthesis of rock & roll. l3 We must also remember that the music industry organizes itself around certain naturalized oppositions. It has a discourse. It speaks. Industrialization, through institutions such as radio, music publishing and licensing, and recording, sanctioned the antithesis that holds that "authentic" music is something distinct from "commercial" music. We consumers, in turn, inherit-organize our thinking by means of-this and other antitheses. When I state, with all sincerity, that "white people exploited, and continue to exploit, black people," I am articulating a central tenet of the music industry. It literally banks on-makes money off-my belief. The assumption that bad (commercial) things happen to "authentic" music is sufficient to generate the real/fake distinction that has become musical common sense. 14 It creates a consumer who understands the history of rock as a series of authentic moments that deteriorated into conventionalized moments, transforming the music into a field of "commercial" imitations of some real thing, and it prompts histories organized around the proper names of acknowledged innovators.

There is, however, an alternative way of looking at the history of popular music and conceptualizing conventionalization that involves an investigation of decomposition as an image capable not only of organizing information, but of generating a formula for the discovery or invention process. Nathaniel Mackey opened up the possibilities of this image when, in his epistolary novel, Bedouin Hornbook, he wrote: "There must be some way, I'm convinced, to invest in the ever so slight suggestion of 'compost' I continue to get from the word compose." IS Brian Eno, a recording artist best known for his production work with David Bowie, U2, and Talking Heads, took it further when he responded to an interviewer's statement: "I would think you'd have mixed feelings about new artists doing something that really isn't new art." He said: If you think of culture as a great big garden, it has to have its compost as well. And lots of people are doing things that

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are ... not dramatic or radical or not even particularly interesting; they're just digestive processes. It's places where a number of little things are being combined and tried out. It's like members of a population. We're all little different turns of the same genetic dice. If you think about music in that way, it makes it much easier to accept that there might be lots of things you might not want to hear again. They happen and they pass and they become the compost for something else to grow from [laughs]. Gardening is such a good lesson for all sorts of things. I6 Even though he has claimed, "I now disagree with nearly everything he said," Eno must have been thinking about composer John Cage when he read gardening as an analogy for musical production. I ? During this interview, Cage-an expert on fungi (and founder of the New York Mycological Society)-was seated in the room with Eno. In Silence, Cage wrote: "I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom." 18 But, one might ask, why mushrooms? Cage remarks, with a wink, that it is because the secondhand bookshops in which he purchases " 'field companions' on fungi" are "in some rare cases next door to shops selling dog-eared sheets of music." His "logic" alerts us to the obvious conclusion that anything mushrooms have to teach us about music is the result of a fortuitous allegory (an accident of signification). Whether mushrooms speak the truth about rock & roll, tell the real story of the way pop music progresses, is completely beside the point. What, then, is the lesson of mushrooms? Simply this: all the Baptist ministers I heard pontificating against pop music while I was growing up were right. Rock & roll is a mushroom, a fungus in the garden of culture. ("My records are parasites on the music business," says Eno.) 19 But given my conception of fungi-greatly influenced by deconstruction, the "parasitical economy" of grammatology, and the "logic of disintegration" advanced by Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin-the ministers' accusations were not nearly as damaging as they were intended to be. 20 In practice, I responded to ministerial admonitions much as David Arora, author of Mushrooms Demystified, responded to his parents' admonitions to "stay away from mushrooms." They "inspired me to get closer." 21 As Gregory Ulmer notes, the lesson taught by mush-

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rooms or, more properly, fungi, since a mushroom is the reproductive structure (fruiting body) of a fungus, is symbiosis. The kind of fungi hunted and eaten by Cage ("the fleshy, fruity, 'higher' fungi, Boletus, Morels, and the like") are "not parasites, but saprophytes (any organism that lives on dead organic matter)." They exist in a "mutually beneficial relationship with their hosts (the green plants and trees which supply the organic 'food')." 22 Writes Arora: "They are nature's recyclers." In feeding on dead matter, they "reduce complex organic compounds to simpler building blocks, thereby enabling plants to reuse them." 23 The saprophyte-which is to say, rock & roll-feeds off the decay of tradition. It treats culture as a compost pile. To understand what this means we need only note that "something becomes an object of knowledge ... only as it ... is made to disintegrate." 24 Popularization does to ideas what decay does to organic materials. It turns them into compost so that they can be transformed into something new. What makes Eno especially interesting is that he has turned this process into a compositional methodology. In the liner notes to Ambient 4/0n Land, he describes his interest in treating "found sound"-"pieces of chain and sticks and stones," "recordings of rooks, frogs and insects," and also the "complete body" of his "earlier work"-as a "completely plastic and malleable material": As a result, some earlier pieces I worked on became digested by later ones, which in turn became digested again. This technique is like composting: converting what would otherwise have been waste into nourishment. 25 Although it is difficult to hear any relationship between his static soundscapes and, say, the music of Madonna or Bruce Springsteen, much less bands such as Sonic Youth, the Mekons, or Husker Du, Eno's method makes explicit the normal functioning of rock & roll. Conventionalization is the compost from which innovation grows: which is to say, it not only enables popularization, it fosters artistic renewal by generating conditions that allow for aberrant readings. To show how this happens, I want to rewrite, in a highly schematic form, Hebdige's history of jazz which I cited early in this essay. Like him, I begin with "white swing." Conventionalization. Restricted (broadcast) codes seek to become

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elaborated (narrowcast) codes. White swing was less a monolithic style of music, than a variety of "popular" musics vying for a "cut" of the market, each seeking to promote itself as a privileged mode of expression. 26 Aberration. Attempts to sell music to a mass audience-to make it fit a variety of conventions or cultural experiences-promote homogeneity (replication of conventions) as well as heterogeneity (aberrant readings of conventions).27 On the levels of production and distribution, conventionalization prompts both experimentation and standardization; on the level of consumption, it allows aberrant decodings ("the rule, not the exception, with mass media messages," writes Fiske recalling Umberto Eco).28 Musical innovators are aberrant readers; Charlie Parker ("Bird") "misinterpreted" the basic materials of swing. Disputation. Boppers (followers of Bird) vs. Moldy Figs (followers of Bunk Johnson-traditional jazz). Conflicts between groups (competing systems of discourse) arise over which musics are and are not innovative, legitimate, authentic, original, etc. They most often take the form of contests or disputes which, as ]ean-Fran\=ois Lyotard puts it, cannot "be resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments." 29 Ratification. Bebop, modern jazz, wins the day. A perceived innovation gains legitimacy by soliciting, gaining, or, in some cases, inventing institutional support. It is retroactively read back as "genuinely" innovative (canonized as a "pure code") by the institution that brings it into language. That, however, does not mean that other (suppressed) musical forms cease to exist; they have merely lost their position of power. This process repeats itself (with a difference) when the validated "pure code," motivated by an institution's attempt to maintain preeminence or hegemony, gets conventionalized (turned into a broadcast code) and, subsequently, read aberrantly. In jazz, this happened when bebop was conventionalized as hard-bop (a style almost as diverse as "white swing"), then read aberrantly by Ornette Coleman. The origins of rock also followed this pattern. In one version of its story, black rhythm & blues (a heteroglot style that had secularized black gospel) was aberrantly read by Little Richard and Elvis

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Presley, and, following a dispute with what, for lack of a better term, might be called "classic pop" (recall Frank Sinatra and Mitch Miller's denunciations of the new style), it was institutionalized as rock & roll. But because it is, like film, a "technologically dependent, capital-intensive, commercial, collaborative medium regulated by the government and financially linked to mass audiences," rock subsequently progressed in a more complicated fashion than jazz (which was performance-dependent).3o In elevating recording above performance, rock created a condition of perpetual conventionalization and, thus, a condition where aberrant readings are always, at least theoretically, the rule for both players and listeners (since practicing amateurs are still numerous in rock, these roles remain scarcely differentiated). That is why, to choose but one example, Prince was rock's exemplary artist of the 1980s. By treating rock history as a compost pile-one suspects that he heard George Clinton before he heard Jimi Hendrix or Little Richard-Prince signified that rock history, as a linear succession of styles supplanting one another, had ceased to exist (which is far from saying that rock is dead). He alerted everyone listening to the fact that rock's past was now always available in synchronic form. "Eventually," John Cage had written in 1954, "everything will be happening at once." 31

Scene: Tower Records, South Street, Philadelphia. Mr X walks up to the sales counter and presents a clerk with a major credit card and a compact disc-Elvis's The Sun Sessions. CLERK: Elvis Presley, huh? MR x: Yeah. CLERK: I don't know, man. If I wanted to hear good Dean Martin, think I'd just buy the real thing.

In every case, the rock musician perceived as innovative is one who has creatively misread the popularized or conventionalized version of the compost pile produced by a previously recognized innovation. Steering a course between repetition (redundancy) and incomprehensibility (entropy), he or she has parlayed an aberrant or perverse

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reading of the past into an authorized reading for the present. Elvis Presley's "misreading" of Dean Martin (a conventionalized version of the saloon singer) makes a good example of this. Marion Keisker, the office manager of Sam Phillips's Sun Records studio in Memphis, remembers that Elvis, during his first audition, relied so heavily on Dean Martin material that she thought "Elvis had decided' ... if he was going to sound like anybody, it was going to be Dean Martin.' " Guitarist Chris Spedding, picking up on this clue (left unexplored in Jerry Hopkins's biography, Elvis), argues that many of Elvis's "actions previously dismissed (or considered perverse when they could not be ignored)" are explained by his admiration for the actor-singer who was, during the mid-1950S, "the most bankable of matinee idols." Comparing Martin's big hit of 1955, "Memories Are Made of This," with "the song Elvis always said was his favorite cut, 'Don't Be Cruel,' a hit in the summer of the following year," Spedding notes: Now, apart from the fact that Elvis borrowed that descendingbass-run-followed-by-guitar-chord ending from Martin's arrangement, other common elements are that sexy, wobbly, almost hiccuping baritone vocal-not yet identifiably "rock" until Elvis made it so-and Martin's novel use of a four-piece gospel-type vocal group which we may now assume inspired Elvis to introduce the Jordanaires on his cut, effectively integrating them into a unique blend with his own lead vocal, thus establishing another rock archetype. 32 The joke is, Elvis's music was a poor imitation of Dean Martin's, and that, strangely enough, has something-maybe everything-to do with why his music is so much better than Martin's ("fifty million Elvis fans can't be wrong"). Elvis's method (whether conscious or not makes absolutely no difference), not just the noise he made, is the essence of rock & roll. Simply notice that one can organize the entire history of rock & roll as a series of four revolutionary moments when something new grew out of critical misreadings of available materials: musical compost. Elvis and Little Richard (mid-1950S) perversely read rhythm & blues and country & western music; Bob Dylan and the Beatles (mid-196os) perversely read early rock & roll and American folk music; the Sex Pistols and the Clash (mid-1970S) perversely

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read art-pop and reggae; Public Enemy and De La Soul (late- 1980s) perversely read pop's basic material object-the record.

A French professor of mine once informed me that Barthes's 5/Z was grossly overrated. He said, "If you want to read 800d criticism on Balzac, don't read Roland Barthes." He was, of course, correct, but he had missed the whole point of contemporary experimental criticism. He not only failed to see that what counts as "good" criticism is now up for grabs, but that innovation (or what rhetoricians call invention) means learning how to read aberrantly, how to generate imminently co-optable misreadings. In 5/Z, Barthes treated Balzac's novella "Sarrasine" as a compost pile, something from which he could fashion another text of his own. Like a rock musician, he treated his basic materials-and surely you thought of this well before I wrote it-like shit. Manure is etymologically linked to maneuver: manouvrer, Old French for working with the hands, cultivating. What some people find objectionable about both contemporary theory and contemporary music is a supposed lack of respect for the very institutions that make intellectual and musical labor possible (entrepreneurial capitalism, the university, the technology of the book or record). Undoubtedly, many are mystified by the "provocative manner, attention to surfaces, aestheticized disposition, and oppositional hedonism" that characterize much theory and music. 33 What, they must wonder, accounts for such rampant questioning of authority, such suspiciousness of things settled long ago? One possibility is that we are seeing what Robert Ray labels "a later manifestation of dandyism." Barthes writes: "[I]n a given historical situationof pessimism and rejection-it is the intellectual class as a whole which, if it does not become militant, is virtually a dandy." 34 The dandy, Baudelaire observed, "appears above all in periods of transition," which makes me suspect that the nearly simultaneous rise of rock & roll and poststructuralism (an umbrella term designating semiotic, psychoanalytic, feminist, and ideological methodologies) is symptomatic of a paradigm shift, a fundamental change in the way we approach the materials of the past (the object of study).3s I shall not elaborate upon this claim except to underscore

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what others have already said. Criticism and popular culture are now being "transformed in the same way that literature and the arts were transformed by the avant-garde movements in the early decades of this century. The break with 'mimesis,' with the values and assumptions of 'realism,' which revolutionized the modernist arts, is now underway."36 This is what differentiates rock & roll and poststructuralism from classical music and formalism (close readings of texts): they entail a shift from readin8 (an interpretive method or "hermeneutics" founded, paradoxically, on replicating the ineffable) to writin8 (an inventive method or "euretics," playing upon surfaces). Or stated differently and, perhaps, hyperbolically, teaching people to analyze means teaching them to reread; teaching people to invent means teaching them to misread. Misreading is the essence of creativity, a skill which our educational institutions have, for the most part, neglected to teach. Most students know how to reread poorly, how to misread not at all. And that is why poststructuralism and rock & roll are important. Both have taken responsibility for exploring means of invention. Both have discovered a few powerful, transferrable ways to misread. I should warn you that what follows is-in the manner of much rock and theory-a bit self-indulgent. In addition to listing and briefly describing four means of misreading, I have taken the opportunity to recommend four exemplary experimental essays and four great records. (I) Doin' It to Death: the lesson of repetition. Cage wrote: "We know two ways to unfocus attention: symmetry is one of them; the other is the over-all where each small part is a sample of what you find elsewhere." Mechanical reproduction, notes Walter Benjamin in his landmark essay, repudiates the values invested in words such as "art" and "authenticity."37 READ:

Jacques Derrida, "Dissemination," Dissemination. Parliament's Greatest Hits (Casablanca, 1984).

LISTEN:

(2) If I Were a Black Man: the lesson of simulation. The "rapp" was "a counterfeit coin, worth about half a farthing, which passed current for a halfpenny in Ireland in the 18th century, owing to the scarcity of genuine money" (OED). When Malcolm McLaren, the

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situationist who packaged the Sex Pistols, was sued for "appropriating" others' music to make his own album, Duck Rock, he said: "All I can say is that accusations of plagiarism don't bother me. As far as I'm concerned it's all I'm useful for." READ: Robert Smithson, "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey," in The Writin8s of Robert Smithson. LISTEN: Gang of Four, A Brief History of the Twentieth Century (Warner Bros., 1980).

(3) Cut & Mix: the lesson of bricola8e. "The process of bricolage

involves carefully and precisely ordering, classifying and arranging into structures the minutiae, the detritus, of the physical world. It is a 'science of the concrete' (as opposed to our 'civilised' science of the 'abstract')." 38 Gregory Ulmer, "Derrida at the Little Bighorn," in Teletheory: Grammatolo8Y in the A8e of Video. LISTEN: Beastie Boys, Paul's Boutique (Capitol, 1989).

READ:

(4) Bring the Noise: the lesson of the parasite. In French, "parasite" means (a) to inhabit another (as a demon possesses a body), (b) to make noise or static, and (c) to take without giving. Writes Simon Reynolds: "[T]he power of pop lies not in its meaning but its noise, not in its import but its force." 39 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "1730: BecomingIntense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ... ," in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. LISTEN: Sonic Youth, Goo (Geffen, 1990). READ:

Notes "Entropy" received its formulation in 1885, when Rudolph Clausius coined the word and stated the first two laws of thermodynamics. See also John Fiske, Introduction to Communication Studies (New York, 1982),87. 2 On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (New York, 1990), ix. 3 Fiske, Communication Studies, 87. 4 Suffice it to say, anyone searching for an essay demonstrating the impossibility I

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7 8 9

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of the original/copy (speech/writing) opposition will find it in Jacques Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy," Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, 1981). Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaninn of Style (London, 1979),46-47. Simon Frith summarizes the rock era thus: "[BJorn around 1956 with Elvis Presley, peaking around 1967 with Snt. Pepper, dying around 1976 with the Sex Pistols" (Simon Frith, "Introduction: Everything Counts," in Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociolony of Pop [New York, 1988], II). Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals & Popular Culture (New York, 1989),68. Ibid., 69-70. Simon Frith, "The Industrialization of Music," in Music for Pleasure, I I. Ibid., 12. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatolony, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976 ), 114-15.

12 13

Frith, "Industrialization of Music," 12. My formula reworks one coined by Gregory Ulmer: "Video is the prosthesis of inventive or euretic thinking, just as literacy is the prosthesis of hermeneutics" (Gregory L. Ulmer, Teletheory: Grammatolony in the Ane of Video [New York, 1989J,42).

14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

Frith, "Playing with Real Feeling," in Music for Pleasure, 57. Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook (Lexington, 1986), 78-79. Rob Tannenbaum, "A Meeting of Sound Minds, John Cage + Brian Eno," Musician, September 1985, 72. Ibid., 66. John Cage, Silence (Middletown, Conn., 1961), 274. Ted Greenwald, "The Wayward Art Rocker Rediscovers Songs," Creem, FebruaryMarch 1991, 39. "Parasitical economy" is Derrida's phrase to describe writing with a text, what he has called the "affirmative" component of deconstruction. Cited in Gregory L. Ulmer, "The Object of Post-Criticism," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash., 1983), 100, 106. I am citing David Arora's dedication to his Mushrooms Demystified: A Comprehensive Guide to the Fleshy Funni (Berkeley, 1986). Ulmer, "Object of Post-Criticism," 105. Arora, Mushrooms Demystified, 6. Ulmer, "Object of Post-Criticism," 97. Liner notes to Brian Eno, Ambient 4/0n Land, Editions EG, EEGCD 20, 1982. Jim Collins, Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism (New York, 1989), 2, 70.

Fiske, Communication Studies, 87. Ibid., 81. Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis, 1988), xi. 30 Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton, 1985), 6.

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Cage, Silel1ce, 187. Chris Spedding, "Elvis & Dino," Musician, February 1990, 129-30. Robert B. Ray, "The ABC of Visual Theory," Visible Lan8ua8e 22 (1988): 428. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1977), 106. Cited in Ray, "A B C of Theory," 428. Ulmer, "Object of Post-Criticism," 83. Cage, Silence, 100; and Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1985), 680-81. Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley, 1977), 51. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore, 1982), 7; and Simon Reynolds, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock (London, 1990), 10.

Paul Evans Los Angeles, 1999

~e

bad rappers shot out of Compton as every light in L.A. blew a fuse. Darkness thundered over sweet California. Most everywhere the power was cut, but the B-boys had batteries (good stuff, alkaline), and boombox rhyme kept on coming, classic-N.W.A, Roxanne Shante, Run-D.M.C., Public Enemy. MC Rudy at the tigerskin steering wheel, switching stations out of sheer nervousness, turned the fat radio knobs to pump up the noise, three Kools smoking simultaneous in his fresh mouth and yet him still chugging malt liquor and huffing sly through a def bullhorn: "Partytime, mothers, dance to the death!" The radio was blasting: he'd tuned in to WLUV-some wild guitar shit, wordless, perfect. Scorching the slick freeway, the crew got spooked by the drive-by shooting under the popped-out arc light-chromed Uzi barrel from a hot Mercedes, wildstyle L.A. midnight fire. OJ Johnny packed the crack, big junkie

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tears shining his caved cheeks, and the ice pipe, too, flared cold brilliant in his shaking hand. Taiwan pipe, top quality. johnny's man Rudy had a fine japanese beeper: supposed to radio him news from fly Latifa. But the good girl was gone, she was nowhere tonight: nothing but loss and fried airwaves. johnny's ghetto bandanna jehovah witness mother was peeping, watching from the smashed-window high rise, she was singing blue gospel, and the boys of her life were high, large, and loose-riding blind-night reckless to some lush ocean. Heaven is a lot like here, only harder. Higher, deeper, sweeter, more. High on the smog-baked hills, Sweet Jane was coming down. He stuck his wet pink tongue through the 0 of the Hollywood sign, candy red lips howling at the moon. He was a dancer, the baddest of the bad-he had the night sweats, the bright purple ghost lesions, the speed and holiness of terminal AIDS. KS, PCP, AIDS, the fucking alphabet. Killer queen, sweet transvestite, pretty flamingo, jane had loved everybody in Beverly Hills-(everybody had whispered: Here she comes, she's a femme fatale)-and now he was running on fire through the night. A strayed beauty from the long-ago, ended American farmland (insecticide? drought? napalm?-whatever), he'd been in town only a month. But, oh baby, oh, what a glorious month. Triumph at the tea dances, he'd been resurrected in the grand reopening death-wish glory holes (after a while, with the plague so rampant as to lose even the gallows-thrill of danger, the sex shoppes had flourishedcoupons, vacation giveaways, heavy-rotation promotion). Toast of the town, he'd been burning. Now, at the corner, his tinsel flapping the shadows of torched boutiques, he was panicked. Like silent movie star ~rheda Bara, popping her eyes out big, her hot mouth open at the oncoming train. Somewhere near, a radio was playing, sending out signals: dangerous guitars. He clicked his red heels together, like some ditz Dorothy trying to beam herself back home. But he wasn't in Kansas anymore. He was another lost angel. He was a fallen-fast lady in the city of night. Heaven is when you've had it up to here. Heaven is you ain't seen nothing yet.

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A beautiful girl from Illinois was crying in Los Angeles. Her dear curls fell down the left side of her face, her big brown eyes took your breath away. Brown-eyed girl in the city of dreams (Buddy Holly girl: every song sung on the radio sings about her). She was crying since she'd lost her baby sister at the mall-she'd searched Burger King, the Gap, Victoria's Secret-and now she had nowhere to run. Something weird had happened: for just a second someone had commandeered the Muzak speakers-for an instant, screaming guitars had poured down on the heads of the baffled shoppers. She fell out of the mall and-nowhere to hide-she kept on going. Heaven holds her darling hand in his. Heaven just will not let go. Down in the valley, stupid Gary trashed his guitar. With the power cut, it was useless. Something'd been strange with the amp anywayhissing, sputtering, garbled messages like backwards tape. Weird. Awesome-probably some twisted interference with radio waves. In the momentary silence, he heard the allnight sprinkler watering the lawn outdoors, the spray of water fanning silver in the starlight beautiful green dreaming suburbs. Moonshine glistened on Gary's skullfuck tattoo. He had the Megadeth T-shirt. One night the band had let him buy them liquor-white Russians and shooter specials at the Roxy uptown. Heavy metal. Now he put down his fingers, bleeding, from the fractured guitar. Dad was boozing on the sofa, Mom was lost in HBO. Gary lay down, breathless, in his darkened room. Around the walls were signs and symbols. In the flickering gleam of the stereo the faked stucco glowed like a temple-half-lit icons: Ozzy Osbourne swallowing a dead bird, ]imi Hendrix igniting his guitar, Marc Bolan strutting a cloak full of eagles. Hieroglyphics off the cover of Zeppelin IVrunic, inscrutable magic. He tuned in the radio, and just when some guitars faded, the radio guy was weeping. Vast, uncontrollable sobs. The radio guy was freaking, for once, for real. The room vibrated. The amp in Gary's hot head vibrated. The radio guy cried-silver tears upon the airwaves. Grabbing up the mousse and hair-spray, stupid Gary was out the window, his hightops just missing the head of the family dog. (;ary on the lam. Go, Gary, Go.

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Heaven is a kick in the teeth. Heaven is the volume cranked up to

10.

In the barrio, Father Diego was trembling. The lights had failed in the middle of mass. Ringing the statue of tender Mary Mother of God, candles blazed all the brighter. The airless, dark church was bare but for widows, rare and pathetic as saints. Rattling the stained-glass windows, low-riders, outside, rumbled the carnival streets. A mariachi band played, drunken, blasted, far-off, off-key. Just before mass, Father Diego had stumbled. He'd been praying too long, his head was a fester. High stress in the hurt barrio: his hands were stained with tobacco like worn stigmata. From deep in his cassock-a pocket poking angrily against his martyred chest-he dug out, frantically, his pills. But right at the sermon, he'd still coughed up blood. And then smiled back at the women to reassure. The smile hung lame, nobody believed it. He went on talking, his mouth crammed with the appalling fierce honey of the taste of Jesus. Then it happened. Eerie. Pin-drop silence in the dark palm-tree barrio. The priest and the women, candle-lit: looking at each otherand flashing on the pain inside, throbbing like a bloody cut. Diego ripped off his cloak, his shoes, his glasses, and he walked on out of there. Heaven hurts like hell. Heaven is every angel crying. His thirtieth mug (around the rim, it said, "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps") of jetblack triple-strength coffee. Why not have the stuff IV'ed? He would if he could. Ditto nicotine. One quick, tubal rush: mainline into the hungry bloodstream. But then he'd have to forgo the subtle, quick crackle of fire as he drew the taste deeply in, the sharp Alpine rush of menthol, the heady dragonclouds of Belair smoke. Solo Jones inhaled again as he readied up another CD, another bulletin from his percolating soul-one more private fuck-the-programmer's-playlist song for his people. Smoke tumbled over the OJ's worrystreaked beard-an almost ironic beatnik goatee, it punctuated his chin, the exclamation point of some language so hip, so baffling, that even he sometimes could not decode it. Solo Jones, lonely spook in his tower. The radio tower for WLUV

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was Babel-massive: 30,000 watts of power-somehow, tonight, its power was spared (the rappers, Sweet Jane, stupid Gary and half the misfits of strange L.A. were listening). Like the tower, Solo was high and mythic: his wraparound Ray Charles allnight orphic shades, his slow creeping cancer with the long shelf-life (alternately cradled and kicked, like a pet), his paychecks swallowed by five alimonies, the prophet had been on the air since fossil-stiff prehistory-Zoot Sims, sweet mean hurt-eyed Sinatra, Monk, Trane, St. Louie Armstrong babbling blissful "What a Wonderful World." More than that, he'd been around since the New Beginning-when all the crooners' mouths had filled with dust, and the words ran out, and the new singers were nothing but a moaning and a cry. Johnny Ray. Little Richard. Ronnie Spector. He'd witnessed while the cocktail lounge exploded-redneck jigaboo cretin wiseguys hurling the piano through the plate-glass window-and the wired guitar screamed back. Sweet Gene Vincent, crippled and whirling. Eddie Cochran. Pickled in pain, Solo could hardly ever rise up and walk. He hadn't done daylight in fourteen seasons. With his voice as oiled and pleading as a phone-booth jerkoff's, through forty years of ratings wars, all he had had to do was talk. And tonight he couldn't even get it up for that. He'd been the first to receive the news. It came in fluttering fresh off the AP wire-reporting some sort of quake heading California homeward, some monster cipher on the Richter scale, seismic disturbance, galvanic, earth-shaking. Solo's mama hadn't raised no fool. He deciphered the wire. Translated, interpreted the thing. Read it for what it really was. The goddam writing on the wall. And now, with his show's producer tearing his hair out (dumb kid fresh from matchbook broadcast night school), Solo leaned into his microphone and cried. He cried with the news of the end of the world. Heaven comes when you least expect it. Between commercials. In the middle of drive-time bullshit everyday what. Her hand trembling the wood of her guitar, Loretta May Brown had the green DT's. Green. Seizing somehow for some control, she color-

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coded her shakes-depending on their force and kind. Green wasn't too bad. It came off Evan Williams Kentucky Whisky-every ounce charcoal-filtered. It wasn't the sharp blue pain she got from vodka, or the deep purple crash off Lord Calvert gin. It wasn't harsh red (J&B), or the brassy throb of Dewar's. Green was smooth and a little pathetic, because it traveled in high trucks from sad Kentucky. From Loretta's own weedy shattered defensive South-sweating exhusbands loaded it up from smoky warehouses and headed I8-wheelers out from Louisville at dawn, so hot even then that heat wrinkled the fouled air. Evan Williams burned like home in her mouth-like home with Daddy, the crushing Bible, the flaying strap, and with Mama, diet pills, black eyes and thirty piled-up, smeared mail-order catalogs full of hope. How could Loretta May not have wandered? Sometimes, even now, 4 A.M., she could taste it-the recalling, so sweet on her tongue, of the moment of leaving: the screen door slamming, the low trumpeting of flies, and her strong, beautiful legs freed toward the road to the West. Heaven: just fifty miles farther. Heaven: the next exit, road narrows, turn left. Baby Catherine wailed. Twenty flights up, in Memorial Hospital, pink and impossibly perfect, one hour and eighteen minutes old, she was the first baby born at the end of the world. No dumb college for Baby Catherine, no sad job for this little sister, no stale gum to chew, no telephone calls, no clothes to buy, no drugs, no therapy, no endless search for love, the search so hard it's like stepping on razors, like bashing your head again and again and again on rock. None of that noise, and Baby knew it. She saw love coming on strong in fireball fury, in a deep and sudden kiss. Just love and love only at the end of the world. In the maternity ward, the doctor wheeled around, just as the lights shut off. He couldn't believe it: a newborn, laughing. Baby Catherine, laughing with the power of perfect love. Heaven is a baby, nothing more. Heaven is skin so terribly soft. Black water lapping his chest, the lifeguard dived through the trashed Pacific. Well-hung, broad-shouldered, he had a body that would not

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quit and, beautiful beast, my God was he dense. His brain, lovely like a teeny, bumpy pebble, you could hear it rolling in his gorgeous head. He was diving sleeker than a dolphin, but dolphins could speak better English. Beachboy blonde in the toxic water, he felt the twentieth-century ocean pour through him, in one ear and out the other, but he had known this: how to save the drowning girl the day before, when, sunstruck, she'd wandered out into the deep end, and he'd cradled her panicked, spitting head, and he'd known how, too, to giggle alone at night in the waves, the infested ocean tumbling him-frugging, twisting, doing the pony-and then turning him loose. Tonight, he stuck his dumb head out of the water-what were all these headlights, brighter than stars, coming at him? Whose were these footsteps heading toward the beach, far off still, but building to thunder? Twenty miles to the east, the studios were over. The lights were dead, big cameras teetered for a second in the windstorm, then crashed and exploded in Hollywood. The ghosts of movie stars lit out seaward-red-jacket James Dean burning in his silver Porsche, Marilyn with her lipstick smeared by pills. And, even deeper, buried in the hills that were vineyards, hidden behind the stone that was banks, malls, and condos, the animal thighs of Navajos and Apaches woke up. Ancient passions sniffed the trashed air. The bones bent, flared up, turned freshly supple, fires started in crumbling femurs, a claw of hand reached upward. The broken hearts quivered, nearly started to pump. And soon, in the night, even the rocks on hills trembled slightly. Wind blew the high grass. Dirt grew damp, freshened. And even stones were eager. Their headlights smoking through the smogged starlight, the bad rappers had never seen an ocean. Now, with it hissing around their hubcaps, they couldn't believe how hard it rocked. Me Rudy felt it pounding like a bass in his chest, he breathed like a baby for the first time in fifteen years, he smiled, and the moon got blinded by his gold teeth. They'd come to the ocean because the radio told them to. That skinny hipster Solo maniac Jones had said the tide was high, the moon

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was full, everything everywhere would soon be over. And MC Rudy couldn't wait. Twenty years in the game, and he was blasted-exhausted, burned out, over with. Maybe the water would do it-hurl his head away. He scooped up water in his leaking cap. He drank it down, no matter the taste. And he turned to OJ Johnny, who'd gone crazy: diving again and again into the water-plunging, flashing like a knife. Stupid Gary got down in the surf, his shaking hands doing air-guitar. He couldn't believe the ocean. It was like those movies they showed on the walls of rehab where all of a sudden some switch gets turned and life is fine, and you're breathing fresh air somewhere corny like maybe a farm, and a nice, pretty girl falls in love with you because you're for once clean and sober and you don't grunt and gasp and weep anymore-you talk like a human. The ocean was what you always wanted from the night: everybody just fucking leaving you alone, and the stars, and "Stairway to Heaven." Gary was knee-deep in the ocean, then the water was high around his chest. He was not drowning but playing. Reaching down deep in the waves toward the guitar of his mind, he rose his hand in the starry, wet air. Power chords. Electric warrior. The amp in his head played the sounds of surf. Crash 'n' burn. Love so fine like crash 'n' burn. The WLUV switchboard was going berserk, total nonlinear, all systems freaked. Every asshole and his brother phoning in. Complainers. Sob sisters. Whiners. "Where's that dickhead OJ get off spreading panic? First that damn guitar, turned up so loud it nearly wrecked my speakers. Then him crying. Jesus Christ. I mean, talk about irresponsible." "What's he mean, 'The end of the world'? I've got children, you know, and that kind of prank, well, it's just not funny." Parents. The ratfuck FCC. Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Advertisers. Radio call-in psychologists. Buttinskis. The dream police. They all wanted the show shut down-N-O-W, now! Solo Joneshow dare he? The spineless fuckwad station manager patched in a few anxiouslistener calls to Solo (let him finesse the disaster: he's the freak who sparked it). The station manager gorged on Maalox, chewed his nails

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over the wife back home at the complex (was she bundling the kids into the back of the Volvo, packing the Mace and getting ready to head mad out to the water? was she tuned into WLUV and going crazy?). And he bitched at himself for ever quitting the gig at the gameshow and crossing over to Solo and this low-wage, bullshit thing called ART. He patched in a few more calls to Solo: Why doesn't the bonkers primadonna pick up? But Solo Jones was gone. Out of it. Into his private moonglo\\' tortured nirvana. Couldn't be bothered with telephone calls. Fuck 'em, raw. He knew who was calling, anyway. They'd been calling since the fifties. Nine-to-fivers. Joykillers. People who vote, mow the lawn, eat right. The enemy. And, tonight of all nights, he couldn't deal with them. They'd never heard the music. Forget tonight's disaster. They'd never even listened when, for forty years, he'd played the songs. Of course, he'd never played the songs for them. He'd put the needle down in the grooves, sent out the whispered dedications, breathed life into the airwaves-for the lonely. Only the lonely. He'd poured the music into the sweet sleeping ear of the American child, high and lost somewhere in the whitewood house. Driven it deep into the wet, famished lover, crazy in the sweated sheets. Coiled it around the anticipant fist. Fed it through the radio hidden under the pillow and clutched at desperate as death. And tonight he was gone past even the music. Past even the shuddering, gasping guitars. Enraptured, inspired, weak at the knees, he needed to program the sounds beneath the sounds. Over the airwaves, he needed to send out what he knew quavered under every liberating, banging drum, under every bended string of all the outlaw guitars (Keith Richards, sliding his skull ring over the fret-board; Jimmy Page, gypsying a blues over the hills and far away). He needed to call to holy prefab fantasy California with moans beyond songs (beyond even the black-leather, skinny-muscled, loving-kindness of The Clash, beyond Joan Jett rocking for every voiceless, choked sister). Solo Jones needed to fill up the airwaves with weeping. And into the mentholated, coffeed microphone, he wept. In the cheap, turquoise sadness of her motel room, 20,000 miles from Nashville (where she'd first tried and failed to "break into the busi-

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ness"), Loretta May Brown got a grip on her guitar. Forlorn, blasted, its dynamo collapsed, L.A. poured in through the window, through the silly pink drapes, and it flooded Loretta. She'd come here because he'd told her to-Hank Williams, in one of her many 4 A.M. visions that could not be mistrusted: they hurt too much. Hank had pulled over, liquored, sweet, elegant and skeletal in his high hat and pale, punished body, he'd pulled over to the ditch in the road in his Cadillac, just as he'd done forty-six years before, a ghost heading north through softening snow on chloral hydrate and whiskey, five hundred songs in his nodding head. And he'd told Loretta that L.A. now was where it's at. Country music was no longer bankrupt, greeting-card farms and pissed grasslands: it was "Steel and glass, baby. Sand and broken dreams and that nuked-up sun that, sugar, it don't ever set." Hank had been right, naturally. Not that she'd ever doubted. Ever since she'd turned off the cactus freeway, the feeling had been right. Here was the heart of the country. City of night. Brilliant, beautiful, and sadder than she'd ever seen. Nightclub to nightclub, bar to bar, motel to motel and bed to bed, she'd chased that sadness, tried to find the words and music to set it to. Tonight, she picked up her guitar and she tried again. And right before she touched the strings, she was startled deep by the sudden silence. All L.A. for a moment: silent. Cars would start on the blacktop below, gunfire would ricochet, a baby would cry, some radio, far off, sounded like weeping. But then, for tense stretches so long they seemed like breath held back impossibly suspenseful, there would be silence. And then she was singing. The one word, "lonesome." Over and over, again and again. It was the right word. The only word. The song flowed out of her. Far from Kentucky, free and open in her lonesome motel room, free and open and final as an opened vein. Saltwater over his bruised mascara, Sweet Jane shone like the silver surfer. His farmland eyes had never found such fantasy-this fierce current, rippling under moonglow, strong as muscle and glimmering soft. He'd become water inside the water: the heavy, burning demand of his body finally freed up and emptied. He lowered his pain into the

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cool, diseased ocean, and melted like one, long, sweet, inexhaustible coming. Littered with trash, the waves pounded like opera, but the sounds were simpler-a cheap song on the radio, lullaby from the forgiving father, a calling from some deep at last wherever that felt like home. Climbing out of the burning Porsche, his plowboy boot darkening in the wet sand, James Dean drew his antique comb through his wild hair. Silver, ragged, it had grown in the grave and he was having trouble piling it high atop his cool skull. But the sea wind was fine, and soon James Dean was dancing, jittery at first, knock-kneed, but then fluid-and then his bones of hands were reaching, holding hot Marilyn high on the waves. Her white wet dress, mildewed and torn but still gorgeous, was whipping over the foam, and she and her plush mouth were laughing now-and it wasn't the stagy kittenish purr anymore, but the sudden light laugh of a woman. Father Diego held the warm, saving hand of the beautiful girl from Illinois whose sister had found her (the girls had kissed too warm in the parking lot outside the mall, shocking everyone). They were gazing serenely out into the ocean, and the old women from his church had followed him, and they were deep waltzing in the water, feeling it gentle on the hems of their widow's nineteenth-century dresses, on their lace mantillas, their rosaries, and their old bones. They were all gathered on the beach with the lifeguard-and he was wondering where'd they'd all come from so fast, and why, and what was happening. What time is it? Finally, thought Solo Jones, as he checked the hour, it'd be dark enough to sneak a look outside. Exhausted from weeping, he glanced back again at his watch, and for a second turned almost nostalgic. He'd flashed on one of the old scars there, above the wrist. Track marks, retired, not quite faded. These days, he thought, nobody tied up anymore. An image flooded his mind-the gleaming old works, untouched for fifteen years: the needle and the spoon, almost medieval, an ancient long castaway sacrament, like some obscure Indian sweatlodge medicine-man trip, where they'd hang from spikes for some dream of purity and pain. He infused more coffee, nearly ate another cigarette. In the cramped

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space above the shining radio control-room dials, he could just reach, creakily, the window. Tentative, he scratched at the aluminum foilhe'd pasted it up over the sunlight glass years ago, an old ghoul's vampire-paranoia trick he'd learned from Lenny Bruce, when the scalded cat was shaking and nearly gone, nearly exited fully into his final shaman funk. Solo Jones pierced the foil, and his tender tired oracular eyes peered out. Movies near the sputtering end of the twentieth century had loved the scene. The cameras, fawning, had lingered long, creamed like a peeper. The lights of L.A. spread out twinkling. How'd it go? "Like diamonds." But not tonight. Coal black, the night. Pure, like painted black. Only the moonlight through the chemical air. The wind blew the high grass. A few stars-stars that had been around since Sputnik, since Elvis first sang-fell on the eager stones. Just like Lennon sang, "Just like starting over." Up in the hospital, Baby Catherine laughed in the dark. The end of the world was easy. It came around four in the morning, on a Tuesday, in Los Angeles, California. In the candle-lit delivery room -all the staff frenzied, rushing like ghosts in their gowns, propping the newborn near the window, hoping for the gift of blasting, saving moonlight. Stuck there, not quite sightless, she beamed beyond thought down on L.A. Who knows what music sang, what signals fired and collided in her pure head? Solo Jones breathed into his microphone. And even through the tornfoil window he heard his breath breathing back. A million radiosghetto blasters, transistors, temporary shit, the people's radios. And, over to the west, he finally did see lights. Headlights. A caravan. Headlights of transitory pilgrim nowhere American cars, metal heaps of movement and the dreamer's impulse, all of them ghosting through the night. Led by his tears on the radio. December's children, the tribe of loss. Ahead of them: the ocean. Behind them: memory. He looked over at the buildings across from the station. Dark, silent-banks, hotels, the hospital. But, from a room, he saw eyes staring back. Perfect, universal just-born eyes. Gypsy, unwhipped,

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freedom, universal eyes. They shone from a head so tiny it was entirely eyes. And they looked without blinking right into him. Navajo and Apache, bare on the backs of bone horses, their ruined flag hair whipping in the wind-the wind, too, sweet on their dry and ancient teeth-were taking over L.A. Taking it back. A vapor and a riot through the dark, car-jam streets, they were drums and screaming and risen. Beneath their hooves, the stones sang. Riders released, they were rolling thunder. Solo Jones shut the fuck up. His cigarette dangled in his old, rhythmic hand. Power drained from the radio tower. He'd stopped crying, stopped gasping, too. He sat back in the dark room, with the open microphone. It reached inside him and picked up his beat. Pounding like a drum. Purely rhythm. Fierce, hard, and lovely. The ocean was singing-rock & roll. It was the waves doing what they wanted. It was nobody telling anybody anything. It was the whip of the world, dropping down useless. Heaven is what nobody believes in. Heaven is nothing but the naked heart.

Martha Nell Smith

Sexual Mobilities in Bruce Springsteen: Performance as Commentary

This guy, call him Bruce-no, he's not a queer, thank God, sir-will be a national hero. -Jefferson Morley I'm always somebody who has a lot of ambiguous feelings about, not necessarily what I want to do, but the style that I want to do it in. . . . But the world will never be simple again, if it ever was. The world is nothing but complex, and if you do not learn to interpret its complexities, you're going to be on the river without a paddle. Human politics. I think that people on their own can do a lot. I guess that's what I'm tryin' to figure out now: where do the aesthetic issues that you write about intersect with some sort of concrete action, some direct involvement, in the communities that your audience comes from? -Bruce Springsteen 1

H ad Allen Ginsberg written Howl in the 1980s, he could not have begun: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

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dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix. At the advent of the twenty-first century, another New Jersey poet, one of the most provocative minds of our generation, Bruce Springsteen, disputes such a claim. Rising from the decadent ashes of rock & roll in the mid-I970S, "the Boss" sent us greetings from Asbury Park, told us about the wild, the innocent, and the E Street shuffle, and asked if we were born to run before, like Hester Prynne, he began to explore that darkness on the edge of town. In the worlds created by Springsteen, the edge of town teems with dangerous possibility: in "Driving out of Darlington County," a storyteller sees his buddy Wayne chained to the bumper of a state trooper's Ford; balladeer and "Highway Patrolman" Joe Roberts pulls to the side of the road to let his "no good" brother Franky escape the legal consequences of a barroom brawl; a heterosexual couple watches their happy illusion of knowing one another so very well begin to dissolve-"is that you baby," "is that me baby"-as their brilliant disguises and cold bed belie the promises of the altar; lives are on the line and "dreams are found and lost" in that darkness on the borderlines. 2 But Springsteen's dark is not simply despair, nor does it serve as cover for a Rolling Stones-like decadence, with the rocker nihilistically resigning himself to the belief that all is finally spectacle and money. As rock & roll critic Dave Marsh has pointed out, in performance Springsteen's medley of "Born to Run" and the Stones's "Street Fighting Man" empties Mick Jagger's question-"What can a poor boy do / 'Cept sing in a rock and roll band?,'-of its "cynical irony." 3 Springsteen overflows not only with a riotous sense of the importance of having fun, but also with compassion and with the unfashionable faith that, working together, people really can make this a better world. Whether readers invoke Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, or Bob Dylan, just like a woman Springsteen makes love to his audience and pleads for connection, not for the romance of each to his or her own independent existence. 4 For my purposes in analyzing the work of one of this particular moment's most challenging rock performers, the important questions concern what Springsteen's conflicting and ambiguous sexual

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expressions on stage and in music videos represent. What do the gestures of this performing self suggest and how might that be significant? His performances of the late 1970S often found him kissing and even humping the Big Man, Clarence Clemons, while the 1985 "Glory Days" music video foregrounds his elaborate homoerotic dances with Miami Steve Van Zandt. Even his album covers stage performances readily construed as homoerotic and/or ambiguously sexual: the shaggy bearded young man nestled among the boys in the band on the back cover of The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, or affectionately draped and smiling over Clemons's shoulder as the listener unfolds the jacket for Born to Run. The feminine earnest face in front of the blinds and peering at us from both sides of the Darkness on the Edge of Town package supplants the scruffy portrait inside the jackets of Greetings from Asbury Park and Born to Run and on front of The Wild, the Innocent, but still appears most comfortable smack dab in the middle of all the boys on The River's inside record sleeves and in the photomontages for the songbook designed to accompany the five-record package, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Live, 1975-1985. No face at all is necessary for the flirtatious pose foregrounding the New Jersey native's posterior as he, sending up Patton on Born in the U.S.A., stands before the red and white stripes of the American flag, red baseball cap tucked in right back pocket. Hands in pockets, leaning against a creamy convertible, Springsteen appears both manly and boyish, simultaneously heteroand homoerotically seductive in the portraits on Tunnel of Love. In the 1990S, however, a scrutiny of Springsteen's video portrayals is more appropriate than study of his poses on album covers for any critique proposing to analyze some import of his social commentary. For one thing, album covers have been miniaturized to CD inserts, one-quarter the size of the soon-to-be extinct cardboard sleeves for LPs. More important, as visual rock-related productions, music videos have much wider currency and more far-reaching influence than album covers. In fact, MTV, VH-I (Video Hits One), and TNN (The Nashville Network)-"24-hour, nonstop, commercial cable channel[s], beamed via satellite across the United States"-as well as video anthologies and singles for rent or to buy, and regular sixty-minute music videoplay programs like Friday Ni8ht Videos,

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Music Video Connection, Niaht Fliaht, and Midniaht Love have dramatically altered ways in which Americans receive popular music. s A viewer/listener of music videos may attend to the productions intently enough to study them or may see/hear them in the most casual fashion-as flickering/melody-making background in a bar or living room, or glimpsed in a department store display. Likewise, as they do with radio, the vast majority of Americans have some contact with music videos, even if only involuntarily. Unlike radio, music videos project televised images, and few in academe, government, or the media would bother to contest the commonplace that televised portrayals of any event or circumstance-wars, assassinations, poverties, political campaigns, space shuttle mission failures, rock & roll songs-are potently compelling in degree and in a multitude of ways that we have hardly begun to discern, much less understand. Record companies believe the slickly produced sights and sounds have a significant impact on consumer spending, while various rock performers like Springsteen believe that videos are vehicles for extending artistic expression. The creative problem for Springsteen, who takes as his subject everyday dreams, "is that the line between democratic populism (the argument that all people's experiences and emotions are equally important, equally worthy to be dramatized and made into art) and market populism (the argument that the consumer is always right, that the market defines cultural value) is very thin."6 Especially poignant are Springsteen's homoerotically suggestive depictions the common consumer does not expect and may in fact prefer to ignore, for the commercial imperative or "wedding of rock music and aesthetic visual forms drawn partly from advertising" of music video production would seem to prohibit unconventional portrayals which are not subverted through irony.? I will content myself with a brief study of the last third of the Bruce Sprinasteen Video Antho]o8y/1978-88, beginning with the electrified "Born to Run" composite of clips of different performances on numerous stages that were assembled in 1987 and ending with the rather subdued acoustic rendition capping his Tunnel of Love concerts recorded a year later in the Los Angeles Sports Arena. 8 Between those two vastly different productions of the song Springsteen hoped would be regarded as the greatest rock & roll piece ever made are video per-

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formances of "Brilliant Disguise," "Tunnel of Love," "One Step Up," "Tougher Than the Rest," and "Spare Parts," three of which were filmed at Springsteen's beloved Jersey shore, all of which are from the Tunnel of Love album. 9 To peruse the videos in this sequence, I shall begin by reading the performances of "Born to Run." Performed with the entire E Street Band, "Born to Run's" electric version features Springsteen among his crowds. In concert footage spanning the last decade, Clarence Clemons is the most prominent, with numerous shots featuring him in various suits and usually intimate poses with the star of the show; depicted almost as frequently, Miami Steve mugs with Bruce and with Van Zandt's replacement Nils Lofgren; when the camera lens turns to ex-wife Julianne, an instant shows her dancing with her husband, then a few long seconds project Springsteen's sister, Pam, laughing and singing on stage with backup singer Patti Scialfa; significantly, one of the longest shots is far from the stage at a Meadowlands concert where wave upon wave of fans bounce before a tiny figure of Bruce, who performs in front of a giant video screen filled with the scene of the crowd. In marked contrast, the acoustic version of "Born to Run" features Springsteen alone in the spotlight, in a black tank top revealing his muscular build, surrounded by darkness and by an audience that might be considered a kind of edge of town. Prose commentary introduces both performances: for the first, Springsteen exhorts, "Remember, in the end, nobody wins unless everybody wins"; before he croons his anthem to conclude the anthology, he reminds listeners "that individual freedom-when it is not connected to some sort of community or friends or the world outside-ends up being pretty meaningless" and that what he is looking for, even in his performances, are "connections." Camping out on Hester's dark edge of town throughout this portion of the video anthology framed by variant "Born to Runs," Springsteen repeatedly explores perhaps the most dangerous territory of all-the Tunnel of Love. About gathering songs together to produce Tunnel of Love, Springsteen has proclaimed: "I wanted to make a record about what I felt, about really letting another person in your life and trying to be part of someone else's life. That's a frightening thing, something that's always filled with shadows and doubts and also wonderful things and beautiful things." 10 For him, writing

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and singing about "something you get from engagement with people, from a connection with a person," clearly entails much more than musing on the particulars of an individual romance. One of the first images of intimate connection offered in the "Born to Run" composite is a stage-wide Springsteen slide, on his knees, to plant a big kiss on none other than the Big Man. Fifteen years before, the Boss told listeners that behind "Wild Billy's Circus" tent, the "hired hand tighten[ed] his legs on the sword swallower's blade." That he would dare to highlight the homoerotic overtones of this long-term friendship in the photomontage production of his anthem and choose a homosexual encounter as one of the salient details of carnival life in a song produced for commercial consumption underscores the fact that one of rock's wealthiest stars is not merely a slave to the marketplace. Even though ours is a country by and large enthralled with football-a game in which men jump allover one another and pat each other's behinds-and with a literary history in which Jim beckons Huck down to the raft, Queequeg and Ishmael enjoy a night beneath the counterpane, and Whitman adores the adhesiveness of manly love, America is not a culture that welcomes displays of erotic love between men, nor one in which men customarily greet one another with a kiss. Americans do not expect popular culture figures-especially those whose fans celebrate their faith that he's "just a regular person; he [Bruce] doesn't come out with earrings and makeup;" he reflects "people's lives back to them in some fashion"-to depict undeniably homoerotic images. Though loyal to his fans, Springsteen clearly "hasn't let that loyalty constrain the development of his art or his audience." 11 By 1988, the sword swallower in the "Tunnel of Love" music video carnival is female, not male, but is haunted by a Queequeg-like figure who keeps peeping around the corner to watch her slowly envelop, then carefully withdraw, the long, double-edged blade. Similarly, Springsteen's constructions of romantic and connective encounters often seem double-edged, contextualizing publicly honored heterosexual couplings with ambiguous or homosexual unions publicly repudiated. And, in keeping with the zeitgeist of the late twentieth century, Springsteen names his beloveds in a most ambiguous fashion: Does the male speaker of "Backstreets" share an "old abandoned

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beach house" with a male or female Terry? Does the speaker of "4th of july, Asbury Park (Sandy)" tell a male or female Sandy that "the Aurora is rising behind us"? Doesn't the male speaker address another male when he affectionately remembers, "We liked the same music, we liked the / same bands, we liked the same clothes," and says, "I / miss you baby, good luck, goodbye, Bobby jean"? 12 To whom are Springsteen's poetically professed passions directed, anyway? What gender are all those beloveds whom he christens so indeterminately? Even Marsh, who likes to emphasize his sUbject's heterosexual escapades, acknowledges that the "homoerotic undercurrent" of Springsteen's recorded and live performances is "undeniable." 13 Extramusical facets of the Springsteen persona also hint at homoeroticism. To whom is his recent bodybuilding most appealing? Indeed, on the 1989 Amnesty International Human Rights tour, the husky-voiced hunk looked fit for a leather bar. Yet such speculation meets resistance in the media-verified facts of what appears to be aggressive heterosexuality. Sharing more than the stage with the "Boss," moving into more than "Clarence's old position," and becoming more than Bruce's "onstage foi!," Patti Scialfa has supplanted julianne as wife and the E Street Band as significant other, a shift People magazine has so jubilantly documented with its publication a couple of years ago of a picture of the rocker on a Rome balcony, cavorting in his underwear with the jersey girl, and its more recent publication of a portrait of the happy family-mom Patti, son Evan james, and dad Bruce. 14 The gaps between Springsteen's polymorphous onstage "wildness" and his offstage fodder-for-the-tabloids heterosexual "innocence" shuffle and blur culturally constructed differences of sexuality and gender. Springsteen precludes definitive determination of sexual preference, mooting a fundamental constraint whereby our culture knows us and names us. Such mooting matters not just because inquiring minds want to know, but because undermining this constraint calls into question conventional representations of love and traditional musical constructions of desire, as well as the way popular cu.lture transforms private pronouncement and ostensibly intimate revelation into cultural commentary. Does living his life as a heterosexual invalidate his staged homoeroticisms? Where/who is Bruce and how

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does anyone know him? Why would he allow his kiss with Clarence and vignettes of homosexual couples in the "Tougher Than the Rest" video to be emphatically framed when there are so many other possibilities for televisual portrayals and when omission of these would probably not even be noticed? In raising such questions, Springsteen exposes many assumptions and illusions underlying sex- and genderdetermined divisions of our culture, and leads audiences into "dangerous"-at least to conventional categorizations and schemes for understanding sexuality-territory. Implicitly, Springsteen both concurs with and modifies Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's assertion that an "essentialism of sexual object choice is far less easy to maintain, far more visibly incoherent, more visibly stressed and challenged at every point in the culture, than any essentialism of gender," for his stage antics and speakers' performances call essentializing notions of the masculine and feminine as well as of sexuality into question. IS When, discussing the blockbuster success of Born in the U.S.A., Marsh notes that conventional wisdom of the star-making machinery holds that a pop star's "sexuality should be simultaneously provocative and reassuring," he specifically identifies the powerful, indisputably homoerotic male bonding in Springsteen's performances as an element sure to unsettle or at least intrigue those attempting to claim him as heterosexually All- American. 16 The "fiery rage and sense of utter betrayal" at the core of Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." performances challenge those who try to claim the song for Reaganaut jingoism; likewise, his blatant homoeroticisms challenge insistences that "Bruce" is simply "the most heterosexual person I ever met" or that "he's not a queer, thank God," revealing both the naIvete of such statements and their tendency to displace accession of the power of the majority and a separative political stance onto judgments about sexuality. I? Such views politicize sexual behavior by territorializing authorized from unauthorized sexualities; and by critiquing national politics and the politics of sexuality through mass cultural media, Springsteen questions the politics of cultural hierarchies that valorize the "highbrow." Andreas Huyssen reminds us that the "lure of mass culture . . . has traditionally been described as the threat of losing oneself in dreams and delusions," of realizing Marx's nightmare and "merely consuming rather than producing." 18 By interrogating

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the ways in which we publish ourselves-sexually and textually--to the world, Springsteen turns the tables on traditional notions (which have only recently begun to lose their force) that have persistently gendered "mass culture as feminine and inferior." Springsteen invariably holds out the microphone for the audience to sing "Show a little faith, there's magic in the night." Introducing the song "War," he usually exhorts his listeners: "Don't blindly follow your leaders ... because blind faith in your leaders or in anything will get you killed." Are his calls for audience participation in performance, and for action beyond the concert, merely disguised forms of commodification encouraging more consumption? Is this yet another feminizing popular culture threat "against which high art has to shore up its terrain"? Or is something else going on here? Like the homoerotic, the feminine has been devalued in our culture. This performer, who superficially looks and sounds like the hometown lusty boy enticing Mary off her front porch and into his front seat, assumes both these devalued positions, perhaps never so clearly as in his concert staging of "Thu"nder Road," which contextualizes my remarks on the video anthology's "Tunnel of Love" sequence in crucial ways. In "Thunder Road's" erotic expressions, there is no ambiguity. The speaker is clearly male, wooing a Mary who is plainly female. Yet like the juxtapositions he arranges for the six televisual renditions of the songs I am discussing here, the staging of "Thunder Road" throws the lyrics' ostensible pronouncements into question. Anyone who has seen a Springsteen and E Street Band concert in which he warbles "The screen door slams / Mary's dress waves / Like a vision she dances across the porch / As the radio plays" is familiar with his "soul kiss with Clarence." 19 As he does in the electric "Born to Run" video, Springsteen slides across stage at the end of "Thunder Road" and kisses Clarence Clemons firmly on the lips. When Marsh pictures this performance ritual in Glory Days, he reproduces four photographs: the first shows Bruce with his face in his hands appearing to weep, and Clarence with his arm around him offering solace; in the second, Clarence's arm wraps around a smiling, presumably comforted Bruce, who clutches the Big Man's coat; in the third, Bruce, on his knees between saxophone-playing Clarence's legs, holding his guitar in a phallic position, looks longingly (and rather seductively) up at

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the Big Man; and in the fourth, Clarence locks Bruce in a loving embrace for a lingering kiss. This fourth pose is especially significant, and not simply because of the kiss. Still between Clarence's legs, Bruce finds himself in what we might call a feminine position. First, Clarence leans down and towers over his friend. But, just as important, Clarence's right arm grips Bruce's shoulder while he holds his left arm aloft, as if he has just proclaimed, like a Baptist or fundamentalist preacher presiding over a rite of immersion, "And I baptize you in the name of. . . ." Thus Clarence assumes the ministerial, stand-in for God, masculine position, while Bruce assumes the believer, church member, feminine place. Is it into the feminine, as well as the homoerotic, that Clarence baptizes him? Contrary to traditional masculine fears of being swallowed up by and lost in the feminine, Springsteen begins to find himself as his eyes adjust to that dark womb of a place, so long banished to the outskirts of culture (or town). As he does in his stage relation to Clemons, in which the kiss becomes an integral part of the performance of "Thunder Road," Springsteen makes something of a ritual of imagining the plight of the female in at least one song on each of his albums and this, too, is important for contextualizing the "Tunnel of Love" music videos. Of course such male scripting of female stories is not new; male artists have long portrayed female characters. Yet, to borrow his phrase, there is "something" quite distinctive in Springsteen's portrayal of "the night" of female experience. As most will suspect, if not remember, Springsteen concerns himself with the working-class womanoften unwed, deserted mothers or those "ladies of the night" who have made sexual performance their capital to purchase means for survival. In "Candy's Room," "strangers from the city" come, bringing toys to purchase her favors; the song's speaker does not pay her, but claims to love her, really, yet "no man can keep Candy safe" from that "sadness all her own." Unlike traditional plots, this narrative unequivocally acknowledges that romance will never prove to be her salvation. In another song, the man who chants "I Wanna Marry You" declares that "true love can't be no fairy tale" and that to "say I'll make your dreams come true would be wrong." The sad woman in "Point Blank" does not "wait on Romeos," but "on that

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welfare check." There are no fairy-tale endings here, no distraught women rescued from their plights by dashing handsome men. In fact, except for one "Tunnel of Love" story, there are no happy endings for abandoned women in Springsteen's narratives, and the sale satisfying resolution he depicts is not one that popular culture fans have come to expect. In "Spare Parts," the song televised next to last on the anthology, Janey, a young unwed mother abandoned by a Bobby full of vain promises, "[w]ent to a drawer in her bureau and got out her old engagement ring," then "[w]ent straight down to the pawn shop man and walked out with some good cold cash." As Springsteen tells us when he introduces the song, Janey has learned to "value ... her own independent existence." Lest you think I contradict myself, having remarked at this article's beginning that Springsteen pleads for connections, not for the romance of each to his own independent existence, some vital differences between pronouns and key terms warrant scrutiny. The great American romance has been that of individuality, the isolated figure, like Ahab, smashing "through the pasteboard mask" to make his mark on the world. That is the romance of independent existence, and, as Annette Kolodny, Nina Baym, and numerous others have astutely observed, a masculinist dream. Springsteen's Janey learns the value of her independent existence, and value is a matter very different from romance. Romance is a fiction that need not account for the necessities of life; valuing oneself and human connections requires, among many other things, taking responsibility for material sustenances necessary for life. 20 "Spare Parts" tells us that, forced to support a child by herself, without the help of the father, Janey hears a story about a mother's infanticide: "a woman over in Calverton / Put her baby in the river let the river roll on." She considers similar action, imagining, therefore, a dark but nevertheless romantic end to her story: "Janey held her son down at the riverside / Waist deep in the water how bright the sun shone." But unlike the woman who sought to drown her despair, Janey "lifted" her son "in her arms and carried him home." So Springsteen's woman rises above the romance surrounding the anguish of a woman victimized by male irresponsibility and broken promises, and thus rises above a plot that ends with a rescuing knight

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in his shining limousine or the woman in utter ruin. Janey sells the symbols of romantic promises so she can deal competently with the material facts of life. Departing from the standard for popular culture storytelling and sounding much more like a woman writer and revisionist mythmaker, Springsteen writes beyond the ending of patriarchal resolution. 21 Janey's "independent existence" is not isolated, but one in which she recognizes the responsibilities of her connection to her son. What Janey has learned is that, though she needs human relationships, she does not need to be connected to a husband to be valuable. Instead of drowning her child, she baptizes him and herself into a new life in which she has a worth all her own. The revision of the biblical myth of the mother with her holy child need not be elaborated, though I should acknowledge in passing that Springsteen also revises himself here. In the power dynamics and the iconography of this baptism, a mother, instead of a black man, occupies the minister's place, and a baby stands in for the Believer/Boss of "Thunder Road." Interrelatednesses impel and underscore Springsteen's artistic vision. The video produced for "Spare Parts" begins with shots of the English countryside-lush green trees blowing with an approaching rain shower, cottages along small roads, and crowds going to a "pop concert"-scored by Roy Bittan's piano interlude. When Springsteen and the rest of the E Street Band break into the opening chords of "Spare Parts," the camera cuts from shots of waving leafy limbs to shots of thousands upon thousands of fans swaying and waving before a stage in Sheffield, then to Bruce singing the opening stanza by himself, then to him repeating it passionately, sometimes unto hoarseness, as Patti begins to sing along. In the performance memorialized on the video, Patti's role is as one half of a duet rather than as the backup singer playing a substantially lesser part on the version recorded for the album. LikeJaney, Patti asserts herself to lead Springsteen himself in the chorus, and thus through performance proclaims that she is not (like a spare part) dispensible, but is in fact an integral part of the band. In the video immediately preceding, other of society's "Spare Parts" are also recuperated by featuring conventional and unconventional video "snapshots" to accompany performance of the love song

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"Tougher Than the Rest." These vignettes-in which couples smile at one another, at the camera, rub one another, kiss one another or goofily grin standing side-by-side-allude to the four-for-a-quarter (or dollar or whatever the price now) picture-taking booths found on boardwalks, in carnivals, in arcades, and in bus stations. One of Richard Poirier's remarks about the Beatles pertains to such performances generated by Springsteen: "Maybe the most important service of the Beatles and similar groups is the restoration to good standing of the simplicities that have frightened us into irony and the search for irony; they locate the beauty and pathos of commonplace feelings even while they work havoc with fashionable or tiresome expressions of these feelings." 22 The lyrics to "Tougher Than the Rest" are ordinary enough to frighten one into irony: "Well it's Saturday night / You're all dressed up in blue / I been watching you awhile / Maybe you been watching me too." But the chorus offers something of an unexpected twist: "Well if you're rough and ready for love / Honey I'm tougher than the rest." Those lines in themselves are not really so extraordinary, particularly in these days when sadomasochism fills the airwaves. Still, the choice of subjects and arrangements in the video scripted for this song disrupt the viewer's expectations. The opening shots show us the Tunnel of Love, then cut to the stage where a rather corpulent, cigar-smoking carnival man is selling tickets to ride. As members of the E Street Band purchase these, the camera carefully frames and viewers can clearly see only two take their "passport": first Clarence, then Patti. Throughout much of the song, Springsteen looks straight at Patti and she looks right back as he sings to her, an apparent televisual testimonial that Springsteen has grown out of his passionate male bonding and into Freud-sanctioned heterosexual maturity. Yet even as interpreting Tunnel of Love "as a report from the marital front is far too facile," so reading the music video "Tougher Than the Rest" as a report on the successful wooing of Patti severely limits understanding of Springsteen's artistic project. 23 The vignettes of adult romances interspersed throughout the scenes of Bruce crooning to Patti (or at play, lying on his back and kicking his feet in the air with other band members, or jumping on speakers, or leaning down into the audience to receive a quick kiss) move back and forth between snapshots of homo- and heteroerotic couplings.

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Each of these twenty or so snippets shows a couple, and most are of course heterosexual. But, without irony, Springsteen's video also features one gay and two lesbian couples. As with his kissing Clarence, these pictures are not the lascivious or decadent play of the Rolling Stones or David Bowie. In contrast to Bowie- or Jaggeresque flamboyance, the homosexual couples in "Tougher Than the Rest" are presented to the viewing audience routinely, as part of a photomontage of all-American lovers. Showing them in a more or less matter-of-fact way, Springsteen's video love song exhorts his audience to expect such romantic unions. However understated, by the very fact of their existence these presentations challenge some of the most deep-seated American attitudes that surely contributed to Springsteen's drawing the conclusion: "One of the problems in the United States is that 'united in our prejudices we stand,' you know? What unites people, very often, is their fear." 24 As his homoerotic play and dress destabilize preconceptions of the emphatic heterosexual, so the homoerotic snapshot portrayals disrupt traditional notions of legitimate and/or "natural" relationships and implicitly critique these biases. The audience's perspective is like that of a camera in one of the booths or that of a video-cam in the hand of someone conducting person-on-the-street interviews: couples being filmed look right out at viewers who look right back at them. Since erasures of homosexual unions from representations of America's quotidian experience have been so pervasive, the gay and lesbian couples could easily have been omitted and no one would have noticed. But by refusing conventional silences and calling attention to the homoerotic facts of life many would just as soon forget or disregard, Springsteen protests the agenda of the narrow-minded who mark homoerotic affections as aberrant and who seek to police desire accordingly. By implication, he also challenges those who, like Jesse Helms, would police artistic representations of desire. His challenges are more sophisticated than mere objections to those who would oppress others. Rigid schematizations of sexuality, pugilistic definitions that depend on excluding the Others to stake their territories, are questioned as well. Sexual textualities in publicly funded art are bound up by notions of artists' intentions and conceptions of images "proper" enough for community sponsorship, and

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Springsteen's depictions demand scrutiny of the definitions and presumed consensus many citizens take for granted. Though in the turn toward the twenty-first century audiences are more willing to accept sexual desires not necessarily substantiating the myth of an unswerving heterosexual highroad, when reading beyond heterosexuality the prevailing urge has been to distinguish that which is Not Me from that which is Like Me. Consequently, lawmakers formulate proprietary codes that defund those who are designated as alien, very different, and threatening to the norm. Such dichotomies are as overly simple as they are easier and more soothing to read. As there is for steady demarcation between male and female, there is still a nostalgia, heterosexual and homosexual, that maintains that homoeroticism is entirely different from heteroeroticism and that wants "natural, fixed" differences in sexual desire as well as between the sexes. Though often a strategy for gay and lesbian will to power, such insistence can also be used to brutalize and oppress homosexuals. It has yet to be seen how, like the promotion of fixed sexual differences, the promotion of fixed differences in sexual desire"whether they are described as natural or culturally constructeddoes anything but maintain an all too familiar system of oppositions and stereotypes." 25 The 1989 legislation stipulating what kinds of artistic enterprises may and may not be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, approved by a United States Senate voice vote on 26 July and passed in slightly modified form in September, justifies itself according to such an ideology of difference. In the first specification of this amendment, which was not altered, blatant stereotyping equates sadomasochism, homoeroticism, and the exploitation of children: None of the funds authorized to be appropriated pursuant to this Act may be used to promote, disseminate, or produce(I) obscene or indecent materials, including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts. 26 Obviously, the thrust of this proposal is to protect the heterosexually pure from any contaminating deviant body. Key to the assumptions delineated is the belief that homoeroticism and sadomasochism can

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be readily identified, labeled dangerously different, then prohibited. 27 Most dangerous is the faith in consensus and in stable definitions that labels the homosexual as Not Like the law-abiding rest of "us." In fact, heterosexist notions of "normality" persist, even within deconstruction. 28 The very idea that the homoerotic can be identified and separated from some monolithic heterosexual norm and then proscribed from federal funding is a political stance that allows little understanding of the complexities of human sexuality. This belief in an ability to separate pure from profane bodies expresses yearnings for stable definitions of sexual desires and parallels yearnings for stable definitive demarcations between male and female. Consonant with those who proclaim Springsteen "the most heterosexual person" are those who, like George Will, triumphantly declare that "there is not a smidgeon of androgyny in Springsteen" and who nostalgically seek to claim him as a manly icon for "a mythical America" and the continuing patriarchal project of manifest destiny.29 Will and others frightened by homosexuality and by those who blur masculine/feminine distinctions invest "the deviant" with a kind of demonic power, and consequently treat it as something to be exorcised. At issue is the power over (and of) interpretation. As in so many critical struggles, "the battleground is representation itself," for "identity and reality are created within representation," and interpretations appear easier to control in realms of definitude. 30 As Sedgwick points out, since "virtually all people are publicly and unalterably assigned to one or the other gender, and from birth," gender orientation appears to be much more stable than sexual orientation, which has a "far greater potential for rearrangement, ambiguity, and representational doubleness." 31 The performances of Springsteen, the virile rock & roller who superficially seems so far removed from these matters of philosophy and sexual theory, challenge audience complacency and force readers to ask not just "what are the guidelines for reading these matters of sex and texts?" but "can there be guidelines for reading sex and texts?" Instead of insisting on determining discrete bodies-sexual beings who are definitively heterosexual, lesbian, bisexual, or asexual-and imposing rules of order, Springsteen relays his "sense of the underlying fraud of all order, the undeniable fact that the universe contain[s]

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as much randomness as structure."32 In "Brilliant Disguise," the second video on the Tunnel of Love sequence, Springsteen perches atop a stool in a rather plain kitchen, an unadorned figure in black and white looking right into the camera at the audience looking right back at him. But the words of the song belie this apparently straightforward presentation by the performer so many think, as Simon Frith has pointed out, conforms to order as "The Real Thing." At a recent benefit for the Christic Institute and in response to a fan screaming, "'We love you, Bruce,' Springsteen responded, without a shred of irony, 'But you don't really know me.' "33 On the surface of things, Bruce Springsteen seems so male, so heterosexual, so frank, so knowable. But close attention to his artistic productions reveals not only how inscrutable he may be, but also how tenuous knowledge is of that most basic element of human nature-sexuality. HOln(H,.'r(!tici~)tn penneatcs his perfornlances. assumption of the fenlinirH' is one of his repeated artistic nlaneuvers, and, though he writes and sings about Adam, he finally seems much more like Eve in his approach to knowledge. Instead of obeying instructions and submitting to divine edict, Eve opts for critical inquiry. In Judeo-Christian mythology, Eve's questions-why not eat of the fruit of knowledge? why accept a state of ignorance?-lead to her and Adam's expulsion from Eden and to the first travel or exploration of new horizons. When she refuses imposed order, Eve learns that one question leads to another and that knowledge about good and evil and about the nature of things is not fixed. Springsteen's performances highlight the fact that the limits ofvarious paradigms for sexuality are as obvious as are their applicabilities. Extending Adrienne Rich's continuum beyond lesbian to include male sexualities begins to describe the diversities of lived sexualitiesheterosexual, lesbian, bisexual, homosexual. Yet the continuum metaphor establishes a scale of passions that finally retains polarities as it measures who is more or less erotic, who is more or less heteroor homosexual. How can such a metaphor be elaborated to account for the myriad and disparate social contexts and constructions of sexual being? The same might be asked of universalizing metaphors that posit an innate bisexuality in each and all. Freud's hypotheses that "everyone has made a homosexual object choice," if only un-

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consciously, helps us see the "fundamental and crucial proposition, call it deconstructive, poststructuralist, postmodern, whatever," that "what a culture designates as alien, utterly other and different, is never so." In our Freudian-inflected world, how can formulations of a normative heterosexuality that represses perverse desire resist reinscribing the violent hierarchies Derrida descries? With so many willing to posit a universal goal of heterosexuality, such a paradigm becomes a convenient tool for those who want to legitimate persecution of the bodies who, having succumbed to their "weak," darker side, threaten civilization itself. 34 However defined and theorized, homosexualities have persisted in every culture and heterosexualities have never been subverted out of being. As Anthony DeCurtis observes, what Springsteen demands of himself and asks of his audience are continuing "explorations of how self-deceit, romantic illusions, and fantasies of control corrupt the bedroom and the boardroom, personal as well as political affairs, and poison human experience": "Inclusiveness is at the heart of his vision." 3S And Springsteen pleads that it be at the heart of ours, urging a refusal of replications of exclusionary dichotomies and theories of knowledge that lay violent claims to imaginary territories. Such exhortations echo Hans Robert Jauss's description of understanding in the "open horizon of onmoving experience" as the "search for or investigation of a possible meaning." In this approach, paradigms for understanding sexuality (or anything else for that matter) are always in the process of revision, and, when allowed to degenerate into instruments for imposing order and presuming control, work against their professed goals. If we heed Jonathan Dollimore's advice to expose the displacement of the political onto the sexual by continually "taking sexuality apart and revealing the histories within it," we will probably, as Springsteen did when evaluating a dance mix of his "Dancing in the Dark"-which radically restructures each composition, "dismantling some sections of a song to its skeleton, doubling other parts, stretching and extending and bending" and reassembling "the record to a danceable commentary on itself"-discover that, like music, sexuality "isn't as fragile" as many have thought. 36 Historically and even to the present day, however, human understanding,

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especially of an aspect like sexuality that so many desperately want to control, has been regarded with a premodernist "closed horizon of expectations," as if it were "the recognition and interpretation of a professed or revealed truth."37 Taking sexuality apart to explore and reconstitute it for a deeper, more inclusive understanding may just prove to be an approach "tougher than the rest." Notes Through their enthusiastic conversation, several people contributed significantly to this essay: Jim Bloom, David Van Leer, Marshall Grossman, Orrin Wang, David Wyatt, Bill Keach and Sheila Emerson, Beth and Bill Loizeaux, Bill Malloy and Deborah Burns, Linda Kauffman, Marilee Lindemann, and, for his encouragement and assistance locating certain articles, Anthony DeCurtis. The first quotation is from a conversation with Ronald Reagan that Jefferson Morley fantasizes in "Bruce Springsteen Born in the U.S.A.: The Phenomenon," Rollins Stone, 5 October 1985, 75. What follows are three of Springsteen's remarks: the first is quoted by Dave Marsh, Glory Days: Bruce Sprinssteen in the 1980s (New York, 1987), 152; the second, by Mikal Gilmore, "Bruce Springsteen" interview, Rollins Stone, 5 November 1987, 23-24; and the third, by Kurt Loder, "The Rolling Stone Interview: Bruce Springsteen," Rollins Stone, 6 December 1984, 21. 2 The albums to which I refer are Bruce Springsteen, Greetinss from Asbury Park, N}. (Columbia Records, 1973), The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (Columbia Records, 1973), Born to Run (Columbia Records, 1975), and Darkness on the Edse of Town (Columbia Records, 1978); the individual songs cited are "Darlington County," Born in the U.S.A. (Columbia Records, 1984), "Highway Patrolman:' Nebraska (Columbia Records, 1982), "Brilliant Disguise," Tunnel of Love (Columbia Records, 1987), and "Darkness on the Edge of Town," title track, Darkness. 3 Marsh, Glory Days, 229. 4 Though I could have cited many more, I choose two of the most well-known feminists theorizing about gendered identity formation. See Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Motherins: Psychoanalysis and the SocioloSY of Gender (Berkeley, 1978); and Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psycholosical Theory and Wonlen's Development (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). 5 E. Ann Kaplan, Rockins Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (New York, 1987), I. A useful collection of theoretical perspectives on video culture is Video Culture: A Critical Investisation, ed. John G. Hanhardt (New York, 1986). 6 Simon Frith, "The Real Thing-Bruce Springsteen," in Music for Pleasure: Essays in the SocioloSY of Pop (New York, 1988), 101. See also Simon Frith's "Toward an

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Aesthetic of Popular Music," in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge, 19 87), 133-49· 7 Kaplan, Rockiny Around the Clock, I I. On politics, commercialism, and art in popular music, particularly rock & roll, see Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Imayes of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music (New York, 1975), and Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (New York, 1989). 8 Bruce Sprinysteen Video Antholoyy/ 1978-88 (CBS Music Video Enterprises, 1989). The televisual performances generated in response to his songs are of course collaborative, incorporating the energies of the producer, director, camera crew, and various performers as well as those of Springsteen. 9 To read about Springsteen's high hopes for "Born to Run," see Gilmore's "Springsteen" interview, 24. "Brilliant Disguise" was filmed at Sandy Hook; "Tunnel of Love" at Asbury Park; and "One Step Up" in Wall Township. 10 This and the quotation in the following sentence are from an interview by Steve Pond. "Bruce Springsteen's 'Tunnel Vision,'" Rollin9 Stone, ') t\1ay 1988, s9-42. II

\lcrlc Ginsberg. "lirllcc Springsteen l'vlade in the U.S.A.: The to ~ h lutH't J